and 

f/CT/OJY 


CRITICISM   AND   FICTION 


CRITICISM 

AND     FICTION 


BY 


W.  D.  HOWELLS 


NEW    YORK 

HARPER  AND  BROTHERS 

MDCCCXCII 


Copyright,  1891,  by  HAKPEK  &  BROTHERS. 


All  ngltt  reierted. 


CRITICISM  AND  FICTION 

,.HE  question  of  a  final  crite 
rion  for  the  appreciation  of 
art  is  one  that  perpetually 
recurs  to  those  interested  in 
any  sort  of  aesthetic  endeav 
or.  Mr.  John  Addington  Symonds,  in  a 
chapter  of  The  Renaissance  in  Italy  treat 
ing  of  the  Bolognese  school  of  painting, 
which  once  had  so  great  cry,  and  was 
vaunted  the  supreme  exemplar  of  the 
grand  style,  but  which  he  now  believes 
fallen  into  lasting  contempt  for  its  empti 
ness  and  soullessness,  seeks  to  determine 
whether  there  can.be  an  enduring  crite 
rion  or  not;  and  his  conclusion  is  applica 
ble  to  literature  as  to  the  other  arts.  "  Our 
hope,"  he  says,  "  with  regard  to  the  unity 
of  taste  in  the  future  then  is,  that  all  senti 
mental  or  academical  seekings  after  the 


20(34865 


ideal  having  been  abandoned,  momentary 
theories  founded  upon  idiosyncratic  or 
temporary  partialities  exploded,  and  noth 
ing  accepted  but  what  is  solid  and  posi 
tive,  the  scientific  spirit  shall  make  men 
progressively  more  and  more  conscious 
of  these  bleibende  Verhaltnisse,  more  and 
more  capable  of  living  in  the  whole  ;  also, 
that  in  proportion  as  we  gain  a  firmer  hold 
upon  our  own  place  in  the  world,  we  shall 
come  to  comprehend  with  more  instinct 
ive  certitude  what  is  simple,  natural,  and 
honest,  welcoming  with  gladness  all  ar 
tistic  products  that  exhibit  these  quali 
ties.  The  perception  of  the  enlightened 
man  will  then  be  the  task  of  a  healthy 
person  who  has  made  himself  acquainted 
with  the  laws  of  evolution  in  art  and  in 
society,  and  is  able  to  test  the  excellence 
of  work  in  any  stage  from  immaturity  to 
decadence  by  discerning  what  there  is  of 
truth,  sincerity,  and  natural  vigor  in  it." 


! 


!HAT  is  to  say,  as  I  under 
stand,  that  moods  and  tastes 
and  fashions  change  ;  people 
^  fancy  now  this  and  now  that ; 
but  what  is  unpretentious 
and  what  is  true  is  always  beautiful  and 
good,  and  nothing  else  is  so.  This  is  not 
saying  that  fantastic  and  monstrous  and 
artificial  things  do  not  please  ;  everybody 
knows  that  they  do  please  immensely  for 
a  time,  and  then,  after  the  lapse  of  a  much 
longer  time,  they  have  the  charm  of  the 
rococo.  Nothing  is  more  curious  than 
the  charm  that  fashion  has.  Fashion  in 
women's  dress,  almost  every  fashion,  is 
somehow  delightful,  else  it  would  never 
have  been  the  fashion  ;  but  if  any  one 
will  look  through  a  collection  of  old  fash 
ion  plates,  he  must  own  that  most  fash 
ions  have  been  ugly.  A  few,  which  could 
be  readily  instanced,  have  been  very  pret 


ty,  and  even  beautiful,  but  it  is  doubtful 
if  these  have  pleased  the  greatest  num 
ber  of  people.  The  ugly  delights  as  well 
as  the  beautiful,  and  not  merely  because 
the  ugly  in  fashion  is  associated  with  the 
young  loveliness  of  the  women  who  wear 
the  ugly  fashions,  and  wins  a  grace  from 
them,  not  because  the  vast  majority  of 
mankind  are  tasteless,  but  for  some  cause 
that  is  not  perhaps  ascertainable.  It  is 
quite  as  likely  to  return  in  the  fashions 
of  our  clothes  and  houses  and  furniture, 
and  poetry  and  fiction  and  painting,  as  the 
beautiful,  and  it  may  be  from  an  instinct 
ive  or  a  reasoned  sense  of  this  that  some 
of  the  extreme  naturalists  have  refused 
to  make  the  old  discrimination  against  it, 
or  to  regard  the  ugly  as  any  less  worthy 
of  celebration  in  art  than  the  beautiful ; 
some  of  them,  in  fact,  seem  to  regard  it 
as  rather  more  worthy,  if  anything.  Pos 
sibly  there  is  no  absolutely  ugly,  no  abso 
lutely  beautiful ;  or  possibly  the  ugly  con 
tains  always  an  element  of  the  beautiful 
better  adapted  to  the  general  apprecia 
tion  than  the  more  perfectly  beautiful. 
This  is  a  somewhat  discouraging  conject- 


ure,  but  I  offer  it  for  no  more  than  it  is 
worth ;  and  I  do  not  pin  my  faith  to  the 
saying  of  one  whom  I  heard  denying,  the 
other  day,  that  a  thing  of  beauty  was  a 
joy  forever.  He  contended  that  Keats 's 
line  should  have  read,  "  Some  things  of 
beauty  are  sometimes  joys  forever,"  and 
that  any  assertion  beyond  this  was  too 
hazardous. 


SHOULD,  indeed,  prefer  an 
other  line  of  Keats's,  if  I 
were  to  profess  any  formu 
lated  creed,  and  should  feel 
much  safer  with  his  "  Beauty 
is  Truth,  Truth  Beauty,"  than  even  with 
my  friend's  reformation  of  the  more  quot 
ed  verse.  It  brings  us  back  to  the  solid 
ground  taken  by  Mr.  Symonds,  which  is 
not.  essentially  different  from  that  taken 
in  the  great  Mr.  Burke's  Essay  on  the 
Sublime  and  the  Beautiful — a  singularly 
modern  book,  considering  how  long  ago 
it  was  wrote  (as  the  great  Mr.  Steele 
would  have  written  the  participle  a  little 
longer  ago),  and  full  of  a  certain  well- 
mannered  and  agreeable  instruction.  In 
some  things  it  is  of  that  droll  little  eigh 
teenth-century  world,  when  philosophy 
had  got  the  neat  little  universe  into  the 
hollow  of  its  hand,  and  knew  just  what 


it  was,  and  what  it  was  for;  but  it  is 
quite  without  arrogance.  "  As  for  those 
called  critics,"  the  author  says,  "they 
have  generally  sought  the  rule  of  the  arts 
in  the  wrong  place;  they  have  sought 
among  poems,  pictures,  engravings,  stat 
ues,  and  buildings;  but  art  can  never  give 
the  rules  that  make  an  art.  This  is,  I  be 
lieve,  the  reason  why  artists  in  general, 
and  poets  principally,  have  been  confined 
in  so  narrow  a  circle ;  they  have  been 
rather  imitators  of  one  another  than  of 
nature.  Critics  follow  them,  and  there 
fore  can  do  little  as  guides.  I  can  judge 
but  poorly  of  anything  while  I  measure  it 
by  no  other  standard  than  itself.  The 
true  standard  of  the  arts  is  in  every  man's 
power ;  and  an  easy  observation  of  the 
most  common,  sometimes  of  the  meanest 
things,  in  natnre  will  give  the  truest 
lights,  where  the  greatest  sagacity  and  in 
dustry  that  slights  such  observation  must 
leave  us  in  the  dark,  or,  what  is  worse, 
amuse  and  mislead  us  by  false  lights." 

If  this  should  happen  to  be  true — and 
it  certainly  commends  itself  to  acceptance 
— it  might  portend  an  immediate  danger 


to  the  vested  interests  of  criticism,  only 
that  it  was  written  a  hundred  years  ago  ; 
and  we  shall  probably  have  the  "  sagacity 
and  industry  that  slights  the  observation  " 
of  nature  long  enough  yet  to  allow  most 
critics  the  time  to  learn  some  more  use 
ful  trade  than  criticism  as  they  pursue 
it.  Nevertheless,  I  am  in  hopes  that  the 
communistic  era  in  taste  foreshadowed 
by  Burke  is  approaching,  and  that  it  will 
occur  within  the  lives  of  men  now  over 
awed  by  the  foolish  old  superstition  that 
literature  and  art  are  anything  but  the 
expression  of  life,  and  are  to  be  judged 
by  any  other  test  than  that  of  their  fidel 
ity  to  it.  The  time  is  coming,  I  hope, 
when  each  new  author,  each  new  artist, 
will  be  considered,  not  in  his  proportion 
to  any  other  author  or  artist,  but  in  his 
relation  to  the  human  nature,  known  to 
us  all,  which  it  is  his  privilege,  his  high 
duty,  to  interpret.  "  The  true  standard 
of  the  artist  is  in  every  man's  power" 
already,  as  Burke  says ;  Michelangelo's 
"light  of  the  piazza,"  the  glance  of  the 
common  eye,  is  and  always  was  the  best 
light  on  a  statue ;  Goethe's  "  boys  and 


blackbirds  "  have  in  all  ages  been  the  real 
connoisseurs  of  berries  ;  but  hitherto  the 
mass  of  common  men  have  been  afraid  to 
apply  their  own  simplicity,  naturalness, 
and  honesty  to  the  appreciation  of  the 
beautiful.  They  have  always  cast  about 
for  the  instruction  of  some  one  who  pro 
fessed  to  know  better,  and  who  browbeat 
wholesome  common-sense  into  the  self- 
distrust  that  ends  in  sophistication.  They 
have  fallen  generally  to  the  worst  of  this 
bad  species,  and  have  been  "  amused  and 
misled  "  (how  pretty  that  quaint  old  use 
of  amuse  is  !)  "  by  the  false  lights  "  of  crit 
ical  vanity  and  self-righteousness.  They 
have  been  taught  tr  compare  what  they 
see  and  what  they  read,  not  with  the  things 
that  they  have  observed  and  known,  but 
with  the  things  that  some  other  artist  or 
writer  has  done.  Especially  if  they  have 
themselves  the  artistic  impulse  in  any  di 
rection  they  are  taught  to  form  them 
selves,  not  upon  life,  but  upon  the  mas 
ters  who  became  masters  only  by  forming 
themselves  upon  life.  The  seeds  of  death 
are  planted  in  them,  and  they  can  pro 
duce  only  the  still-born,  the  academic 


They  are  not  told  to  take  their  work  into 
the  public  square  and  see  if  it  seems  true 
to  the  chance  passer,  but  to  test  it  by  the 
work  of  the  very  men  who  refused  and 
decried  any  other  test  of  their  own  work 
The  young  writer  who  attempts  to  report 
the  phrase  and  carriage  of  every-day  life, 
who  tries  to  tell  just  how  he  has  heard 
men  talk  and  seen  them  look,  is  made  to 
feel  guilty  of  something  low  and  unwor 
thy  by  the  stupid  people  who  would  like 
to  have  him  show  how  Shakespeare's  men 
talked  and  looked,  or  Scott's,  or  Thack 
eray's,  or  Balzac's,  or  Hawthorne's,  or 
Dickens's ;  he  is  instructed  to  idealize 
his  personages,  that  is,  to  take  the  life- 
likeness  out  of  them,  and  put  the  book- 
likeness  into  them.  He  is  approached  in 
the  spirit  of  the  wretched  pedantry  into 
which  learning,  much  or  little,  always  de 
cays  when  it  withdraws  itself  and  stands 
apart  from  experience  in  an  attitude  of 
imagined  superiority,  and  which  would 
say  with  the  same  confidence  to  the  sci 
entist  :  "  I  see  that  you  are  looking  at  a 
grasshopper  there  which  you  have  found 
in  the  grass,  and  I  suppose  you  intend  to 


describe  it.  Now  don't  waste  your  time 
and  sin  against  culture  in  that  way.  I've 
got  a  grasshopper  here,  which  has  been 
evolved  at  considerable  pains  and  ex 
pense  out  of  the  grasshopper  in  general  ; 
in  fact,  it's  a  type.  It's  made  up  of  wire 
and  card-board,  very  prettily  painted  in 
a  conventional  tint,  and  it's  perfectly  in 
destructible.  It  isn't  very  much  like  a 
real  grasshopper,  but  it's  a  great  deal 
nicer,  and  it's  served  to  represent  the 
notion  of  a  grasshopper  ever  since  man 
emerged  from  barbarism.  You  may  say 
that  it's  artificial.  Well,  it  is  artificial; 
but  then  it  s  ideal  too  ;  and  what  you  want 
to  do  is  to  cultivate  the  ideal.  You'll  find 
the  books  full  of  my  kind  of  grasshopper, 
and  scarcely  a  trace  of  yours  in  any  of 
them.  The  thing  that  you  are  proposing 
to  do  is  commonplace;  but  if  you  say  that 
it  isn't  commonplace,  for  the  very  reason 
that  it  hasn't  been  done  before,  you'll  have 
to  admit  that  it's  photographic." 

As  I  said,  I  hope  the  time  is  coming 
when  not  only  the  artist,  but  the  com 
mon,  average  man,  who  always  "  has  the 
standard  of  the  arts  in  his  power,"  will 


have  also  the  courage  to  apply  it,  and  will 
reject  the  ideal  grasshopper  wherever  he 
finds  it,  in  science,  in  literature,  in  art,  be 
cause  it  is  not  "  simple,  natural,  and  hon 
est,"  because  it  is  not  like  a  real  grass 
hopper.  But  I  will  own  that  I  think  the 
time  is  yet  far  off,  and  that  the  people 
who  have  been  brought  up  on  the  ideal 
grasshopper,  the  heroic  grasshopper,  the 
impassioned  grasshopper,  the  self -devot 
ed,  adventureful,  good  old  romantic  card 
board  grasshopper,  must  die  out  before 
the  simple,  honest,  and  natural  grasshop 
per  can  have  a  fair  field.  I  am  in  no 
haste  to  compass  the  end  of  these  good 
people,  whom  I  find  in  the  mean  time 
very  amusing.  It  is  delightful  to  meet 
one  of  them,  either  in  print  or  out  of  it — 
some  sweet  elderly  lady  or  excellent  gen 
tleman  whose  youth  was  pastured  on  the 
literature  of  thirty  or  forty  years  ago — and 
to  witness  the  confidence  with  which  they 
preach  their  favorite  authors  as  all  the  law 
and  the  prophets.  They  have  common 
ly  read  little  or  nothing  since,  or,  if  they 
have,  they  have  judged  it  by  a  stand 
ard  taken  from  these  authors,  and  never 


«3 


dreamed  of  judging  it  by  nature;  they 
are  destitute  of  the  documents  in  the  case 
of  the  later  writers ;  they  suppose  that 
Balzac  was  the  beginning  of  realism,  and 
that  Zola  is  its  wicked  end  ;  they  are  quite 
ignorant,  but  they  are  ready  to  talk  you 
down,  if  you  differ  from  them,  with  an 
assumption  of  knowledge  sufficient  for 
any  occasion.  The  horror,  the  resent 
ment,  with  which  they  receive  any  ques 
tion  of  their  literary  saints  is  genuine ; 
you  descend  at  once  very  far  in  the  mor 
al  and  social  scale,  and  anything  short 
of  offensive  personality  is  too  good  for 
you;  it  is  expressed  to  you  that  you  are 
one  to  be  avoided,  and  put  down  even 
a  little  lower  than  you  have  naturally 
fallen. 

These  worthy  persons  are  not  to  blame  ; 
it  is  part  of  their  intellectual  mission  to 
represent  the  petrifaction  of  taste,  and  to 
preserve  an  image  of  a  smaller  and  cruder 
and  emptier  world  than  we  now  live  in,  a 
world  which  was  feeling  its  way  towards 
the  simple,  the  natural,  the  honest,  but 
was  a  good  deal  "  amused  and  misled  " 
by  lights  now  no  longer  mistakable  for 


heavenly  luminaries.  They  belong  to  a 
time,  just  passing  away,  when  certain  au 
thors  were  considered  authorities  in  cer 
tain  kinds,  when  they  must  be  accepted 
entire  and  not  questioned  in  any  particu 
lar.  Now  we  are  beginning  to  see  and  to 
say  that  no  author  is  an  authority  except 
in  those  moments  when  he  held  his  ear 
close  to  Nature's  lips  and  caught  her  very 
accent.  These  moments  are  not  continu 
ous  with  any  authors  in  the  past,  and  they 
are  rare  with  all.  Therefore  I  am  not 
afraid  to  say  now  that  the  greatest  clas 
sics  are  sometimes  not  at  all  great,  and 
that  we  can  profit  by  them  only  when  we 
hold  them,  like  our  meanest  contempora 
ries,  to  a  strict  accounting,  and  verify 
their  work  by  the  standard  of  the  arts 
which  we  all  have  in  our  power,  the  sim 
ple,  the  natural,  and  the  honest. 

Those  good  people,  those  curious  and 
interesting  if  somewhat  musty  back-num 
bers,  must  always  have  a  hero,  an  idol  of 
some  sort,  and  it  is  droll  to  find  Balzac, 
who  suffered  from  their  sort  such  bitter 
scorn  and  hate  for  his  realism  while  he 
was  alive,  now  become  a  fetich  in  his 


turn,  to  be  shaken  in  the  faces  of  those 
who  will  not  blindly  worship  him.  But 
it  is  no  new  thing  in  the  history  of  litera 
ture:  whatever  is  established  is  sacred 
with  those  who  do  not  think.  At  the  be 
ginning  of  the  century,  when  romance 
was  making  the  same  fight  against  effete 
classicism  which  realism  is  making  to-day 
against  effete  romanticism.the  Italian  poet 
Monti  declared  that  "the  romantic  was 
the  cold  grave  of  the  Beautiful,"  just  as 
the  realistic  is  now  supposed  to  be.  The 
romantic  of  that  day  and  the  real  of  this 
are  in  certain  degree  the  same.  Roman 
ticism  then  sought,  as  realism  seeks  now, 
to  widen  the  bounds  of  sympathy,  to  lev 
el  every  barrier  against  aesthetic  freedom, 
to  escape  from  the  paralysis  of  tradition. 
It  exhausted  itself  in  this  impulse  ;  and 
it  remained  for  realism  to  assert  that  fidel 
ity  to  experience  and  probability  of  mo 
tive  are  essential  conditions  of  a  great 
imaginative  literature.  It  is  not  a  new 
theory,  but  it  has  never  before  universal 
ly  characterized  literary  endeavor.  When 
realism  becomes  false  to  itself,  when  it 
heaps  up  facts  merely,  and  maps  life  in- 


stead  of  picturing  it,  realism  will  per 
ish  too.  Every  true  realist  instinctively 
knows  this,  and  it  is  perhaps  the  reason 
why  he  is  careful  of  every  fact,  and  feels 
himself  bound  to  express  or  to  indicate 
its  meaning  at  the  risk  of  over -moraliz 
ing.  In  life  he  finds  nothing  insignifi 
cant  ;  all  tells  for  destiny  and  character ; 
nothing  that  God  has  made  is  contempti 
ble.  He  cannot  look  upon  human  life 
and  declare  this  thing  or  that  thing  un 
worthy  of  notice,  any  more  than  the  sci 
entist  can  declare  a  fact  of  the  material 
world  beneath  the  dignity  of  his  inquiry. 
He  feels  in  every  nerve  the  equality  of 
things  and  the  unity  of  men ;  his  soul  is 
exalted,  not  by  vain  shows  and  shadows 
and  ideals,  but  by  realities,  in  which  alone 
the  truth  lives.  In  criticism  it  is  his  busi 
ness  to  break  the  images  of  false  gods 
and  misshapen  heroes,  to  take  away  the 
poor  silly  toys  that  many  grown  people 
would  still  like  to  play  with.  He  cannot 
keep  terms  with  Jack  the  Giant-killer  or 
Puss  in  Boots,  under  any  name  or  in  any 
place,  even  when  they  reappear  as  the 
convict  Vautrec,  or  the  Marquis  de  Mon- 


trivaut,  or  the  Sworn  Thirteen  Noblemen. 
He  must  say  to  himself  that  Balzac,  when 
he  imagined  these  monsters,  was  not  Bal 
zac,  he  was  Dumas ;  he  was  not  realistic, 
he  was  romantic 


Ill 

[UCH  a  critic  will  not  respect 
Balzac's  good  work  the  less 
for  contemning  his  bad  work. 
He  will  easily  account  for  the 
bad  work  historically,  and 
when  he  has  recognized  it,  will  trouble 
himself  no  further  with  it.  In  his  view  no 
living  man  is  a  type,  but  a  character ;  now 
noble,  now  ignoble ;  now  grand,  now  little; 
complex,  full  of  vicissitude.  He  will  not 
expect  Balzac  to  be  always  Balzac,  and 
will  be  perhaps  even  more  attracted  to  the 
study  of  him  when  he  was  trying  to  be 
Balzac  than  when  he  had  become  so.  In 
Cesar  Birotteau,  for  instance,  he  will  be 
interested  to  note  how  Balzac  stood  at  the 
beginning  of  the  great  things  that  have 
followed  since  in  fiction.  There  is  an  in 
teresting  likeness  between  his  work  in 
this  and  Nicolas  Gogol's  in  Dead  Souls, 
which  serves  to  illustrate  the  simultane- 


ity  of  the  literary  movement  in  men  of 
such  widely  separated  civilizations  and 
conditions.  Both  represent  their  char 
acters  with  the  touch  of  exaggeration 
which  typifies ;  but  in  bringing  his  story 
to  a  close,  Balzac  employs  a  beneficence 
unknown  to  the  Russian,  and  almost  as 
universal  and  as  apt  as  that  which  smiles 
upon  the  fortunes  of  the  good  in  the  Vicar 
of  Wakefield.  It  is  not  enough  to  have 
rehabilitated  Birotteau  pecuniarily  and 
socially ;  he  must  make  him  die  trium 
phantly,  spectacularly,  of  an  opportune 
hemorrhage,  in  the  midst  of  the  festivi 
ties  which  celebrate  his  restoration  to  his 
old  home.  Before  this  happens,  human 
nature  has  been  laid  under  contribution 
right  and  left  for  acts  of  generosity  tow 
ards  the  righteous  bankrupt ;  even  the 
king  sends  him  six  thousand  francs.  It 
is  very  pretty ;  it  is  touching,  and  brings 
the  lump  into  the  reader's  throat ;  but  it 
is  too  much,  and  one  perceives  that  Bal 
zac  lived  too  soon  to  profit  by  Balzac. 
The  later  men,  especially  the  Russians, 
have  known  how  to  forbear  the  excesses 
of  analysis,  to  withhold  the  weakly  recur- 


ring  descriptive  and  caressing  epithets, 
to  let  the  characters  suffice  for  them 
selves.  All  this  does  not  mean  that  Ce 
sar  Birotteau  is  not  a  beautiful  and  pa 
thetic  story,  full  of  shrewdly  considered 
knowledge  of  men,  and  of  a  good  art 
struggling  to  free  itself  from  self -con 
sciousness.  But  it  does  mean  that  Bal 
zac,  when  he  wrote  it,  was  under  the  bur 
den  of  the  very  traditions  which  he  has 
helped  fiction  to  throw  off.  He  felt 
obliged  to  construct  a  mechanical  plot, 
to  surcharge  his  characters,  to  moralize 
openly  and  baldly;  he  permitted  himself 
to  "sympathize  "  with  certain  of  his  peo 
ple,  and  to  point  out  others  for  the  ab 
horrence  of  his  readers.  This  is  not  so 
bad  in  him  as  it  would  be  in  a  novelist  of 
our  day.  It  is  simply  primitive  and  inev 
itable,  and  he  is  not  to  be  judged  by  it. 


IV 


N  the  beginning  of  any  art 
even  the  most  gifted  worker 
must  be  crude  in  his  meth 
ods,  and  we  ought  to  keep 
this  fact  always  in  mind 
when  we  turn,  say,  from  the  purblind 
worshippers  of  Scott  to  Scott  himself,  and 
recognize  that  he  often  wrote  a  style  cum 
brous  and  diffuse ;  that  he  was  tediously 
analytical  where  the  modern  novelist  is 
dramatic,  and  evolved  his  characters  by 
means  of  long-winded  explanation  and 
commentary;  that,  except  in  the  case  of 
his  lower-class  personages,  he  made  them 
talk  as  seldom  man  and  never  woman 
talked ;  that  he  was  tiresomely  descrip 
tive  ;  that  on  the  simplest  occasions  he 
went  about  half  a  mile  to  express  a 
thought  that  could  be  uttered  in  ten  paces 
across  lots ;  and  that  he  trusted  his  read 
ers'  intuitions  so  little  that  he  was  apt  to 


rub  in  his  appeals  to  them.  He  was  prob 
ably  right :  the  generation  which  he  wrote 
for  was  duller  than  this;  slower-witted,  aes 
thetically  untrained,  and  in  maturity  not 
so  apprehensive  of  an  artistic  intention 
as  the  children  of  to-day.  All  this  is  not 
saying  Scott  was  not  a  great  man  ;  he  was 
a  great  man,  and  a  very  great  novelist  as 
compared  with  the  novelists  who  went 
before  him.  He  can  still  amuse  young 
people,  but  they  ought  to  be  instructed 
how  false  and  how  mistaken  he  often 
is,  with  his  mediaeval  ideals,  his  blind 
Jacobitism,  his  intense  devotion  to  aris 
tocracy  and  royalty ;  his  acquiescence  in 
the  division  of  men  into  noble  and  ig 
noble,  patrician  and  plebeian,  sovereign 
and  subject,  as  if  it  were  the  law  of  God  ; 
for  all  which,  indeed,  he  is  not  to  blame 
as  he  would  be  if  he  were  one  of  our  con 
temporaries.  Something  of  this  is  true 
of  another  master,  greater  than  Scott  in 
being  less  romantic,  and  inferior  in  being 
more  German,  namely,  the  great  Goethe 
himself.  He  taught  us,  in  novels  other 
wise  now  antiquated,  and  always  full  of 
German  clumsiness,  that  it  was  false  to 


good  art — which  is  never  anything  but  the 
reflection  of  life — to  pursue  and  round  the 
career  of  the  persons  introduced,  whom 
he  often  allowed  to  appear  and  disappear 
in  our  knowledge  as  people  in  the  actual 
world  do.  This  is  a  lesson  which  the 
writers  able  to  profit  by  it  can  never  be 
too  grateful  for ;  and  it  is  equally  a  ben 
efaction  to  readers ;  but  there  is  very  lit 
tle  else  in  the  conduct  of  the  Goethean 
novels  which  is  in  advance  of  their  time  ; 
this  remains  almost  their  sole  contribu 
tion  to  the  science  of  fiction.  They  are 
very  primitive  in  certain  characteristics, 
and  unite  with  their  calm,  deep  insight, 
an  amusing  helplessness  in  dramatization. 
"  Wilhelm  retired  to  his  room,  and  in 
dulged  in  the  following  reflections,"  is  a 
mode  of  analysis  which  would  not  be 
practised  nowadays ;  and  all  that  fanci- 
fulness  of  nomenclature  in  Wilhelm  Meis- 
ter  is  very  drolly  sentimental  and  feeble. 
The  adventures  with  robbers  seem  as  if 
dreamed  out  of  books  of  chivalry,  and 
the  tendency  to  allegorization  affects  one 
like  an  endeavor  on  the  author's  part  to 
escape  from  the  unrealities  which  he  must 


•4 


have  felt  harass  ingly,  German  as  he  was. 
Mixed  up  with  the  shadows  and  illusions 
are  honest,  wholesome,  every-day  people, 
who  have  the  air  of  wandering  homeless- 
ly  about  among  them,  without  definite 
direction ;  and  the  mists  are  full  of  a  lu 
minosity  which,  in  spite  of  them,  we  know 
for  common-sense  and  poetry.  What  is 
useful  in  any  review  of  Goethe's  methods 
is  the  recognition  of  the  fact,  which  it 
must  bring,  that  the  greatest  master  can 
not  produce  a  masterpiece  in  a  new  kind. 
The  novel  was  too  recently  invented  in 
Goethe's  day  not  to  be,  even  in  his  hands, 
full  of  the  faults  of  apprentice  work. 


\ 


)N  fact,  a  great  master  may 
sin  against  the  "  modesty  of 
nature  "  in  many  ways,  and  I 
have  felt  this  painfully  in 
reading  Balzac's  romance — 
it  is  not  worthy  the  name  of  novel — Le 
Pere  Goriot,  which  is  full  of  a  malarial 
restlessness,  wholly  alien  to  healthful  art. 
After  that  exquisitely  careful  and  truth 
ful  setting  of  his  story  in  the  shabby 
boarding-house,  he  fills  the  scene 'with 
figures  jerked  about  by  the  exaggerated 
passions  and  motives  of  the  stage.  We 
cannot  have  a  cynic  reasonably  wicked, 
disagreeable,  egoistic ;  we  must  have  a 
lurid  villain  of  melodrama,  a  disguised 
convict,  with  a  vast  criminal  organiza 
tion  at  his  command,  and 

"So  dyed  double  red" 


in  deed  and  purpose  that  he  lights  up  the 
faces  of  the  horrified  spectators  with  his 


glare.  A  father  fond  of  unworthy  chil 
dren,  and  leading  a  life  of  self-denial  for 
their  sake,  as  may  probably  and  pathet 
ically  be,  is  not  enough ;  there  must  be 
an  imbecile,  trembling  dotard,  willing  to 
promote  even  the  liaisons  of  his  daugh 
ters  to  give  them  happiness  and  to  teach 
the  sublimity  of  the  paternal  instinct. 
The  hero  cannot  sufficiently  be  a  selfish 
young  fellow,  with  alternating  impulses 
of  greed  and  generosity ;  he  must  su 
perfluously  intend  a  career  of  iniquitous 
splendor,  and  be  swerved  from  it  by  noth 
ing  but  the  most  cataclysmal  interposi 
tions.  It  can  be  said  that  without  such 
personages  the  plot  could  not  be  trans 
acted  ;  but  so  much  the  worse  for  the 
plot.  Such  a  plot  had  no  business  to  be  ; 
and  while  actions  so  unnatural  are  imag 
ined,  no  mastery  can  save  fiction  from 
contempt  with  those  who  really  think 
about  it.  To  Balzac  it  can  be  forgiven, 
not  only  because  in  his  better  mood  he 
gave  us  such  biographies  as  Eugenie  Gran- 
det,  but  because  he  wrote  at  a  time  when 
fiction  was  just  beginning  to  verify  the 
externals  of  life,  to  portray  faithfully  the 


outside  of  men  and  things.  It  was  still 
held  that  in  order  to  interest  the  reader 
the  characters  must  be  moved  by  the  old 
romantic  ideals ;  we  were  to  be  taught 
that  "  heroes  "  and  "  heroines  "  existed 
all  around  us,  and  that  these  abnormal 
beings  needed  only  to  be  discovered  in 
their  several  humble  disguises,  and  then 
we  should  see  every-day  people  actuated 
by  the  fine  frenzy  of  the  creatures  of  the 
poets.  How  false  that  notion  was  few 
bui  the  critics,  who  are  apt  to  be  rather 
belated,  need  now  be  told.  Some  of 
these  poor  fellows,  however,  still  contend 
that  it  ought  to  be  done,  and  that  human 
feelings  and  motives,  as  God  made  them 
and  as  men  know  them,  are  not  good 
enough  for  novel-readers. 

This  is  more  explicable  than  would  ap 
pear  at  first  glance.  The  critics — and  in 
speaking  of  them  one  always  modestly 
leaves  one's  self  out  of  the  count  for  some 
reason— when  they  are  not  elders  ossified 
in  tradition,  are  apt  to  be  young  people, 
and  young  people  are  necessarily  conserv 
ative  in  their  tastes  and  theories.  They 
have  the  tastes  and  theories  of  their  in- 


structors,  who  perhaps  caught  the  truth 
of  their  day,  but  whose  routine  life  has 
been  alien  to  any  other  truth.  There  is 
probably  no  chair  of  literature  in  this 
country  from  which  the  principles  now 
shaping  the  literary  expression  of  every 
civilized  people  are  not  denounced  and 
confounded  with  certain  objectionable 
French  novels,  or  which  teaches  young 
men  anything  of  the  universal  impulse 
which  has  given  us  the  work,  not  only  of 
Zola,  but  of  Tourgueneff  and  Tolstoi  in 
Russia,  of  Bjornson  and  Ibsen  in  Nor 
way,  of  Valdes  and  Galdos  in  Spain,  of 
Verga  in  Italy.  Till  these  younger  crit 
ics  have  learned  to  think  as  well  as  to 
write  for  themselves  they  will  persist  in 
heaving  a  sigh,  more  and  more  perfunc 
tory,  for  the  truth  as  it  was  in  Sir  Wal 
ter,  and  as  it  was  in  Dickens  and  in  Haw 
thorne.  Presently  all  will  have  been 
changed ;  they  will  have  seen  the  new 
truth  in  larger  and  larger  degree ;  and 
when  it  shall  have  become  the  old  truth, 
they  will  perhaps  see  it  all. 


VI 


the  mean  time  the  average 
of  criticism  is  not  wholly 
bad  with  us.  To  be  sure,  the 
critic  sometimes  appears  in 
the  panoply  of  the  savages 
whom  we  have  supplanted  on  this  conti 
nent  ;  and  it  is  hard  to  believe  that  his 
use  of  the  tomahawk  and  the  scalping- 
knife  is  a  form  of  conservative  surgery. 
It  is  still  his  conception  of  his  office  that 
he  should  assail  with  obloquy  those  who 
differ  with  him  in  matters  of  taste  or 
opinion ;  that  he  must  be  rude  with  those 
he  does  not  like,  and  that  he  ought  to  do 
them  violence  as  a  proof  of  his  superior 
ity.  It  is  too  largely  his  superstition  that 
because  he  likes  a  thing  it  is  good,  and 
because  he  dislikes  a  thing  it  is  bad ;  the 
reverse  is  quite  possibly  the  case,  but  he  is 
yet  indefinitely  far  from  knowing  that  in 
affairs  of  taste  his  personal  preference  en- 


ters  very  little.  Commonly  he  has  no 
principles,  but  only  an  assortment  of  pre 
possessions  for  and  against ;  and  this  oth 
erwise  very  perfect  character  is  sometimes 
uncandid  to  the  verge  of  dishonesty.  He 
seems  not  to  mind  misstating  the  position 
of  any  one  he  supposes  himself  to  disagree 
with,  and  then  attacking  him  for  what 
he  never  said,  or  even  implied  ;  the  critic 
thinks  this  is  droll,  and  appears  not  to 
suspect  that  it  is  immoral.  He  is  not 
tolerant ;  he  thinks  it  a  virtue  to  be  in 
tolerant  ;  it  is  hard  for  him  to  understand 
that  the  same  thing  may  be  admirable  at 
one  time  and  deplorable  at  another ;  and 
that  it  is  really  his  business  to  classify 
and  analyze  the  fruits  of  the  human  mind 
very  much  as  the  naturalist  classifies  th£ 
objects  of  his  study,  rather  than  to  praise 
or  blame  them  ;  that  there  is  a  measure 
of  the  same  absurdity  in  his  trampling 
on  a  poem,  a  novel,  or  an  essay  that  does 
not  please  him  as  in  the  botanist's  grind 
ing  a  plant  underfoot  because  he  does 
not  find  it  pretty.  He  does  not  conceive 
that  it  is  his  business  rather  to  identify 
the  species  and  then  explain  how  and 


where  the  specimen  is  imperfect  and  ir 
regular.  If  he  could  once  acquire  this 
simple  idea  of  his  duty  he  would  be  much 
more  agreeable  company  than  he  now  is, 
and  a  more  useful  member  of  society ; 
though  I  hope  I  am  not  yet  saying  that 
he  is  not  extremely  delightful  as  he  is, 
and  wholly  indispensable.  He  is  certain 
ly  more  ignorant  than  malevolent ;  and 
considering  the  hard  conditions  under 
which  he  works,  his  necessity  of  writing 
hurriedly  from  an  imperfect  examination 
of  far  more  books,  on  a  greater  variety  of 
subjects,  than  he  can  even  hope  to  read, 
the  average  American  critic — the  ordi 
nary  critic  of  commerce,  so  to  speak — is 
very  well  indeed.  Collectively  he  is  more 
than  this ;  for  the  joint  effect  of  our  crit 
icism  is  the  pretty  thorough  appreciation 
of  any  book  submitted  to  it. 


VII 

iHE  misfortune  rather  than 
the  fault  of  our  individual 
critic  is  that  he  is  the  heir  of 
the  false  theory  and  bad  man 
ners  of  the  English  school. 
The  theory  of  that  school  has  apparently 
been  that  almost  any  person  of  glib  and 
lively  expression  is  competent  to  write  of 
almost  any  branch  of  polite  literature  ;  its 
manners  are  what  we  know.  The  Ameri 
can,  whom  it  has  largely  formed,  is  by  nat 
ure  very  glib  and  very  lively,  and  com 
monly  his  criticism,  viewed  as  imaginative 
work,  is  more  agreeable  than  that  of  the 
Englishman  ;  but  it  is,  like  the  art  of  both 
countries,  apt  to  be  amateurish.  In  some 
degree  our  authors  have  freed  themselves 
from  English  models ;  they  have  gained 
some  notion  of  the  more  serious  work  of 
the  Continent ;  but  it  is  still  the  ambi- 


tion  of  the  American  critic  to  write  like 
the  English  critic,  to  show  his  wit  if  not 
his  learning,  to  strive  to  eclipse  the  au 
thor  under  review  rather  than  illustrate 
him.  He  has  not  yet  caught  on  to  the 
fact  that  it  is  really  no  part  of  his  busi 
ness  to  display  himself,  but  that  it  is 
altogether  his  duty  to  place  a  book  in 
such  a  light  that  the  reader  shall  know 
its  class,  its  function,  its  character.  The 
vast  good-nature  of  our  people  preserves 
us  from  the  worst  effects  of  this  criticism 
without  principles.  Our  critic,  at  his 
lowest,  is  rarely  malignant ;  and  when  he 
is  rude  or  untruthful,  it  is  mostly  without 
truculence ;  I  suspect  that  he  is  often  of 
fensive  without  knowing  that  he  is  so. 
If  he  loves  a  shining  mark  because  a  fair 
shot  with  mud  shows  best  on  that  kind 
of  target,  it  is  for  the  most  part  from  a 
boyish  mischievousness  quite  innocent  of 
malice.  Now  and  then  he  acts  simply 
under  instruction  from  higher  authority, 
and  denounces  because  it  is  the  tradition 
of  his  publication  to  do  so.  In  other 
cases  the  critic  is  obliged  to  support  his 
journal's  repute  for  severity,  or  for  wit, 


or  for  morality,  though  he  may  himself  be 
entirely  amiable,  dull,  and  wicked ;  this 
necessity  more  or  less  warps  his  verdicts. 
The  worst  is  that  he  is  personal,  per 
haps  because  it  is  so  easy  and  so  natural 
to  be  personal,  and  so  instantly  attractive. 
In  this  respect  our  criticism  has  not  im 
proved  from  the  accession  of  numbers 
of  ladies  to  its  ranks,  though  we  still 
hope  so  much  from  women  in  our  poli 
tics  when  they  shall  come  to  vote.  They 
have  come  to  write,  and  with  the  effect 
to  increase  the  amount  of  little-digging, 
which  rather  superabounded  in  our  liter 
ary  criticism  before.  They  "  know  what 
they  like"  —  that  pernicious  maxim  of 
those  who  do  not  know  what  they  ought 
to  like — and  they  pass  readily  from  cen 
suring  an  author's  performance  to  cen 
suring  him.  They  bring  a  lively  stock  of 
misapprehensions  and  prejudices  to  their 
work ;  they  would  rather  have  heard 
about  than  known  about  a  book ;  and 
they  take  kindly  to  the  public  wish  to  be 
amused  rather  than  edified.  But  neither 
have  they  so  much  harm  in  them :  they, 
too,  are  more  ignorant  than  malevolent. 


VIII 

UR  criticism  is  disabled  by 
the  unwillingness  of  the  crit 
ic  to  learn  from  an  author, 
and  his  readiness  to  mistrust 
him.  A  writer  passes  his 
whole  life  in  fitting  himself  for  a  certain 
kind  of  performance ;  the  critic  does  not 
ask  why,  or  whether  the  performance  is 
good  or  bad,  but  if  he  does  not  like  the 
kind,  he  instructs  the  writer  to  go  off  and 
do  some  other  sort  of  thing — usually  the 
sort  that  has  been  done  already,  and  done 
sufficiently.  If  he  could  once  understand 
that  a  man  who  has  written  the  book  he 
dislikes,  probably  knows  infinitely  more 
about  its  kind  and  his  ov^n  fitness  for  do 
ing  it  than  any  one  else,  the  critic  might 
learn  something,  and  might  help  the  read 
er  to  learn ;  but  by  putting  himself  in  a 
false  position,  a  position  of  superiority,  he 
is  of  no  use.  He  ought,  in  the  first  place, 


to  cast  prayerfully  about  for  humility,  and 
especially  to  beseech  the  powers  to  pre 
serve  him  from  the  sterility  of  arrogance 
and  the  deadness  of  contempt,  for  out  of 
these  nothing  can  proceed.  He  is  not  to 
suppose  that  an  author  has  committed  an 
offence  against  him  by  writing  the  kind 
of  book  he  does  not  like ;  he  will  be  far 
more  profitably  employed  on  behalf  of 
the  reader  in  finding  out  whether  they 
had  better  not  both  like  it.  Let  him 
conceive  of  an  author  as  not  in  any  wise 
on  trial  before  him,  but  as  a  reflection 
of  this  or  that  aspect  of  life,  and  he  will 
not  be  tempted  to  browbeat  him  or  bully 
him. 

The  critic  need  not  be  impolite  even 
to  the  youngest  and  weakest  author.  A 
little  courtesy,  or  a  good  deal,  a  constant 
perception  of  the  fact  that  a  book  is  not 
a  misdemeanor,  a  decent  self-respect  that 
must  forbid  the  civilized  man  the  savage 
pleasure  of  wounding,  are  what  I  would 
ask  for  our  criticism,  as  something  which 
will  add  sensibly  to  its  present  lustre. 


IX 


WOULD  have  my  fellow- 
critics  consider  what  they 
are  really  in  the  world  for. 
It  is  not,  apparently,  for  a 
great  deal,  because  their 
only  excuse  for  being  is  that  somebody 
else  has  been.  The  critic  exists  because 
the  author  first  existed.  If  books  failed 
to  appear,  the  critic  must  disappear,  like 
the  poor  aphis  or  the  lowly  caterpillar 
in  the  absence  of  vegetation.  These  in 
sects  may  both  suppose  that  they  have 
something  to  do  with  the  creation  of 
vegetation  ;  and  the  critic  may  suppose 
that  he  has  something  to  do  with  the 
creation  of  literature ;  but  a  very  little 
reasoning  ought  to  convince  alike  aphis, 
caterpillar,  and  critic  that  they  are  mis 
taken.  The  critic— to  drop  the  others — 
must  perceive,  if  he  will  question  himself 
more  carefully,  that  his  office  is  mainly 


to  ascertain  facts  and  traits  of  literature, 
not  to  invent  or  denounce  them ;  to  dis 
cover  principles,  not  to  establish  them ; 
to  report,  not  to  create. 

It  is  so  much  easier  to  say  that  you 
like  this  or  dislike  that,  than  to  tell  why 
one  thing  is,  or  where  another  thing 
comes  from,  that  many  flourishing  critics 
will  have  to  go  out  of  business  altogether 
if  the  scientific  method  comes  in,  for 
then  the  critic  will  have  to  know  some 
thing  beside  his  own  mind,  which  is 
often  but  a  narrow  field.  He  will  have 
to  know  something  of  the  laws  of  that 
mind,  and  of  its  generic  history. 

The  history  of  all  literature  shows  that 
even  with  the  youngest  and  weakest  au 
thor  criticism  is  quite  powerless  against 
his  will  to  do  his  own  work  in  his  own 
way;  and  if  this  is  the  case  in  the  green 
wood,  how  much  more  in  the  dry !  It 
has  been  thought  by  the  sentimentalist 
that  criticism,  if  it  cannot  cure,  can  at 
least  kill,  and  Keats  was  long  alleged  in 
proof  of  its  efficacy  in  this  sort.  But  crit 
icism  neither  cured  nor  killed  Keats,  as 
we  all  now  very  well  know.  It  wound- 


ed,  it  cruelly  hurt  him,  no  doubt ;  and  it 
is  always  in  the  power  of  the  critic  to 
give  pain  to  the  author  —  the  meanest 
critic  to  the  greatest  author — for  no  one 
can  help  feeling  a  rudeness.  But  every 
literary  movement  has  been  violently  op 
posed  at  the  start,  and  yet  never  stayed 
in  the  least,  or  arrested,  by  criticism; 
every  author  has  been  condemned  for 
his  virtues,  but  in  no  wise  changed  by  it. 
In  the  beginning  he  reads  the  critics  ;  but 
presently  perceiving  that  he  alone  makes 
or  mars  himself,  and  that  they  have  no 
instruction  for  him,  he  mostly  leaves  off 
reading  them,  though  he  is  always  glad 
of  their  kindness  or  grieved  by  their 
harshness  when  he  chances  upon  it. 
This,  I  believe,  is  the  general  experience, 
modified,  of  course,  by  exceptions. 

Then,  are  we  critics  of  no  use  in  the 
world  ?  I  should  not  like  to  think  that, 
though  I  am  not  quite  ready  to  define 
our  use.  More  than  one  sober  thinker  is 
inclining  at  present  to  suspect  that  aes 
thetically  or  specifically  we  are  of  no  use, 
and  that  we  are  only  useful  historically ; 
that  we  may  register  laws,  but  not  enact 


them.  I  am  not  quite  prepared  to  admit 
that  aesthetic  criticism  is  useless,  though 
in  view  of  its  futility  in  any  given  in 
stance  it  is  hard  to  deny  that  it  is  so.  It 
certainly  seems  as  useless  against  a  book 
that  strikes  the  popular  fancy,  and  pros 
pers  on  in  spite  of  condemnation  by  the 
best  critics,  as  it  is  against  a  book  which 
does  not  generally  please,  and  which  no 
critical  favor  can  make  acceptable.  This 
is  so  common  a  phenomenon  that  I  won 
der  it  has  never  hitherto  suggested  to 
criticism  that  its  point  of  view  was  al 
together  mistaken,  and  that  it  was  really 
necessary  to  judge  books  not  as  dead 
things,  but  as  living  things — things  which 
have  an  influence  and  a  power  irrespective 
of  beauty  and  wisdom,  and  merely  as  ex 
pressions  of  actuality  in  thought  and  feel 
ing.  Perhaps  criticism  has  a  cumulative 
and  final  effect;  perhaps  it  does  some 
good  we  do  not  know  of.  It  apparently 
does  not  affect  the  author  directly,  but  it 
may  reach  him  through  the  reader.  It 
may  in  some  cases  enlarge  or  diminish 
his  audience  for  a  while,  until  he  has  thor 
oughly  measured  and  tested  his  own 


powers.  If  criticism  is  to  affect  literature 
at  all,  it  must  be  through  the  writers  who 
have  newly  left  the  starting-point,  and 
are  reasonably  uncertain  of  the  race,  not 
with  those  who  have  won  it  again  and 
again  in  their  own  way.  I  doubt  if  it 
can  do  more  than  that ;  but  if  it  can  do 
that  I  will  admit  that  it  may  be  the  toad 
of  adversity,  ugly  and  venomous,  from 
whose  unpleasant  brow  he  is  to  snatch 
the  precious  jewel  of  lasting  fame. 

I  employ  this  figure  in  all  humility,  and 
I  conjure  our  fraternity  to  ask  them 
selves,  without  rancor  or  offence,  whether 
I  am  right  or  not.  In  this  quest  let  us 
get  together  all  the  modesty  and  candor 
and  impartiality  we  can  ;  for  if  we  should 
happen  to  discover  a  good  reason  for 
continuing  to  exist,  these  qualities  will 
be  of  more  use  to  us  than  any  others  in 
examining  the  work  of  people  who  really 
produce  something. 


X 


IOMETIMES  it  has  seemed 
to  me  that  the  crudest  ex 
pression  of  any  creative  art 
is  better  than  the  finest 
comment  upon  it.  I  have 
sometimes  suspected  that  more  thinking, 
more  feeling  certainly,  goes  to  the  crea 
tion  of  a  poor  novel  than  to  the  produc 
tion  of  a  brilliant  criticism ;  and  if  any 
novel  of  our  time  fails  to  live  a  hundred 
years,  will  any  censure  of  it  live  ?  Who 
can  endure  to  read  old  reviews  ?  One 
can  hardly  read  them  if  they  are  in  praise 
of  one's  own  books. 

The  author  neglected  or  overlooked 
need  not  despair  for  that  reason,  if  he 
will  reflect  that  criticism  can  neither 
make  nor  unmake  authors ;  that  there 
have  not  been  greater  books  since  criti 
cism  became  an  art  than  there  were  be- 


fore ;    that   in    fact   the  greatest   books 
seem  to  have  come  much  earlier. 

That,  which  criticism  seems  most  cer 
tainly  to  have  done  is  to  have  put  a  liter 
ary  consciousness  into  books  unfelt  in 
the  early  masterpieces,  but  unfelt  now 
only  in  the  books  of  men  whose  lives 
have  been  passed  in  activities,  who  have 
been  used  to  employing  language  as  they 
would  have  employed  any  implement,  to 
effect  an  object,  who  have  regarded  a 
thing  to  be  said  as  in  no  wise  different 
from  a  thing  to  be  done.  In  this  sort  I 
have  seen  no  modern  book  so  unconscious 
as  General  Grant's  Personal  Memoirs. 
The  author's  one  end  and  aim  is  to  get 
the  facts  out  in  words.  He  does  not  cast 
about  for  phrases,  but  takes  the  word, 
whatever  it  is,  that  will  best  give  his 
meaning,  as  if  it  were  a  man  or  a  force  of 
men  for  the  accomplishment  of  a  feat  of 
arms.  There  is  not  a  moment  wasted  in 
preening  and  prettifying,  after  the  fash 
ion  of  literary  men ;  there  is  no  thought 
of  style,  and  so  the  style  is  good  as  it  is 
in  the  Book  of  Chronicles,  as  it  is  in  the 
Pilgrim's  Progress,  with  a  peculiar,  al- 


most  plebeian,  plainness  at  times.  There 
is  no  more  attempt  at  dramatic  effect 
than  there  is  at  ceremonious  pose  ;  things 
happen  in  that  tale  of  a  mighty  war  as 
they  happened  in  the  mighty  war  itself, 
without  setting,  without  artificial  reliefs 
one  after  another,  as  if  they  were  all  of 
one  quality  and  degree.  Judgments  are 
delivered  with  the  same  unimposing 
quiet ;  no  awe  surrounds  the  tribunal  ex 
cept  that  which  comes  from  the  weight 
and  justice  of  the  opinions ;  it  is  always 
an  unaffected,  unpretentious  man  who  is 
talking;  and  throughout  he  prefers  to 
wear  the  uniform  of  a  private,  with  noth 
ing  of  the  general  about  him  but  the 
shoulder-straps,  which  he  sometimes  for 
gets. 


XI 


•  ANON  FARRAR'S  opinions 
of  literary  criticism  are  very 
much  to  my  liking,  perhaps 
because  when  I  read  them  I 
found  them  so  like  my  own, 
already  delivered  in  print.  He  tells  the 
critics  that  "  they  are  in  no  sense  the  legis 
lators  of  literature,  barely  even  its  judges 
and  police  ;  "  and  he  reminds  them  of  Mr. 
Ruskin's  saying  that  "  a  bad  critic  is  prob 
ably  the  most  mischievous  person  in  the 
world,"  though  a  sense  of  their  relative 
proportion  to  the  whole  of  life  would  per 
haps  acquit  the  worst  among  them  of  this 
extreme  of  culpability.  A  bad  critic  is  as 
bad  a  thing  as  can  be,  but,  after  all,  his 
mischief  does  not  carry  very  far.  Other 
wise  it  would  be  mainly  the  conventional 
books  and  not  the  original  books  which 
would  survive  ;  for  the  censor  who  imag 
ines  himself  a  law-giver  can  give  law 


4<5 


only  to  the  imitative  and  never  to  the 
creative  mind.  Criticism  has  condemned 
whatever  was,  from  time  to  time,  fresh 
and  vital  in  literature ;  it  has  always 
fought  the  new  good  thing  in  behalf  of 
the  old  good  thing;  it  has  invariably  fos 
tered  and  encouraged  the  tame,  the  trite, 
the  negative.  Yet  upon  the  whole  it  is 
the  native,  the  novel,  the  positive  that 
has  survived  in  literature.  Whereas,  if 
bad  criticism  were  the  most  mischievous 
thing  in  the  world,  in  the  full  implica 
tion  of  the  words,  it  must  have  been  the 
tame,  the  trite,  the  negative,  that  sur 
vived. 

Bad  criticism  is  mischievous  enough, 
however;  and  I  think  that  much  if 
not  most  current  criticism  as  practised 
among  the  English  and  Americans  is 
bad,  is  falsely  principled,  and  is  condi 
tioned  in  evil.  It  is  falsely  principled 
because  it  is  unprincipled,  or  without 
principles ;  and  it  is  conditioned  in  evil 
because  it  is  almost  wholly  anonymous. 
At  the  best  its  opinions  are  not  con 
clusions  from  certain  easily  verifiable 
principles,  but  are  effects  from  the  wor- 


ship  of  certain  models.  They  are  in 
so  far  quite  worthless,  for  it  is  the  very 
nature  of  things  that  the  original  mind 
cannot  conform  to  models ;  it  has  its 
norm  within  itself ;  it  can  work  only  in 
its  own  way,  and  by  its  self-given  laws. 
Criticism  does  not  inquire  whether  a 
work  is  true  to  life,  but  tacitly  or  explic 
itly  compares  it  with  models,  and  tests  it 
by  them.  If  literary  art  travelled  by  any 
such  road  as  criticism  would  have  it  go, 
it  would  travel  in  a  vicious  circle,  and 
would  arrive  only  at  the  point  of  depart 
ure.  Yet  this  is  the  course  that  criticism 
must  always  prescribe  when  it  attempts 
to  give  laws.  Being  itself  artificial  it 
cannot  conceive  of  the  original  except  as 
the  abnormal.  It  must  altogether  recon- 
ceive  its  office  before  it  can  be  of  use  to 
literature.  It  must  reduce  this  to  the 
business  of  observing,  recording,  and 
comparing;  to  analyzing  the  material 
before  it,  and  then  synthetizing  its  im 
pressions.  Even  then,  it  is  not  too  much 
to  say  that  literature  as  an  art  could  get 
on  perfectly  well  without  it.  Just  as 
many  good  novels,  poems,  plays,  essays, 


sketches,  would  be  written  if  there  were 
no  such  thing  as  criticism  in  the  literary 
world,  and  no  more  bad  ones. 

But  it  will  be  long  before  criticism  ceas 
es  to  imagine  itself  a  controlling  force, 
to  give  itself  airs  of  sovereignty,  and  to 
issue  decrees.  As  it  exists  it  is  mostly  a 
mischief,  though  not  the  greatest  mis 
chief;  but  it  may  be  greatly  ameliorated 
in  character  and  softened  in  manner  by 
the  total  abolition  of  anonymity. 

I  think  it  would  be  safe  to  say  that  in 
no  other  relation  of  life  is  so  much  bru 
tality  permitted  by  civilized  society  as  in 
the  criticism  of  literature  and  the  arts. 
Canon  Farrar  is  quite  right  in  reproach 
ing  literary  criticism  with  the  uncandor 
of  judging  an  author  without  reference 
to  his  aims  ;  with  pursuing  certain  writ 
ers  from  spite  and  prejudice,  and  mere 
habit ;  with  misrepresenting  a  book  by 
quoting  a  phrase  or  passage  apart  from 
the  context ;  with  magnifying  misprints 
and  careless  expressions  into  important 
faults;  with  abusing  an  author  for  his 
opinions ;  with  base  and  personal  mo 
tives.  Every  writer  of  experience  knows 


49 


that  certain  critical  journals  will  con 
demn  his  work  without  regard  to  its 
quality,  even  if  it  has  never  been  his  fort 
une  to  learn,  as  one  author  did  from  a 
repentant  reviewer,  that  in  a  journal  pre 
tending  to  literary  taste  his  books  were 
given  out  for  review  with  the  caution, 
"  Remember  that  the  Clarion  is  opposed 
to  Soandso's  books."  Any  author  is  in 
luck  if  he  escapes  without  personal  abuse; 
contempt  and  impertinence  as  an  author 
no  one  will  escape. 

The  final  conclusion  appears  to  be  that 
the  man,  or  even  the  young  lady,  who  is 
given  a  gun,  and  told  to  shoot  at  some 
passer  from  behind  a  hedge,  is  placed  in 
circumstances  of  temptation  almost  too 
strong  for  human  nature. 

4 


XII 

I  have  already  intimated,  I 
doubt  the  more  lasting  effects 
of  unjust  criticism.  It  is  no 
part  of  my  belief  that  Keats 's 
fame  was  long  delayed  by  it, 
or  Wordsworth's,  or  Browning's.  Some 
thing  unwonted,  unexpected,  in  the  qual 
ity  of  each  delayed  his  recognition ;  each 
was  not  only  a  poet,  he  was  a  revolution, 
a  new  order  of  things,  to  which  the  crit 
ical  perceptions  and  habitudes  had  pain 
fully  to  adjust  themselves.  But  I  have 
no  question  of  the  gross  and  stupid  in 
justice  with  which  these  great  men  were 
used,  and  of  the  barbarization  of  the  pub 
lic  mind  by  the  sight  of  the  wrong  in 
flicted  on  them  with  impunity.  This  sav 
age  condition  still  persists  in  the  toler 
ation  of  anonymous  criticism,  an  abuse 
that  ought  to  be  as  extinct  as  the  tort 
ure  of  witnesses.  It  is  hard  enough  to 


treat  a  fellow-author  with  respect  even 
when  one  has  to  address  him,  name  to 
name,  upon  the  same  level,  in  plain  day; 
swooping  down  upon  him  in  the  dark, 
panoplied  in  the  authority  of  a  great 
journal,  it  is  impossible. 

Every  now  and  then  some  idealist 
comes  forward  and  declares  that  you 
should  say  nothing  in  criticism  of  a  man's 
book  which  you  would  not  say  of  it  to 
his  face.  But  I  am  afraid  this  is  asking 
too  much.  I  am  afraid  it  would  put  an 
end  to  all  criticism  ;  and  that  if  it  were 
practised  literature  would  be  left  to  purify 
itself.  I  have  no  doubt  literature  would 
do  this ;  but  in  such  a  state  of  things 
there  would  be  no  provision  for  the  crit 
ics.  We  ought  not  to  destroy  critics,  we 
ought  to  reform  them,  or  rather  trans 
form  them,  or  turn  them  from  the  as 
sumption  of  authority  to  a  realization  of 
their  true  function  in  the  civilized  state. 
They  are  no  worse  at  heart,  probably, 
than  many  others,  and  there  are  prob 
ably  good  husbands  and  tender  fathers, 
loving  daughters  and  careful  mothers, 
among  them.  I  venture  to  suppose  this 


because  I  have  read  that  Monsieur  de 
Paris  is  an  excellent  person  in  all  the  re 
lations  of  private  life,  and  is  extremely 
anxious  to  conceal  his  dreadful  occupa 
tion  from  those  dear  to  him. 

It  is  evident  to  any  student  of  human 
nature  that  the  critic  who  is  obliged  to 
sign  his  review  will  be  more  careful  of 
an  author's  feelings  than  he  would  if  he 
could  intangibly  and  invisibly  deal  with 
him  as  the  representative  of  a  great  jour 
nal.  He  will  be  loath  to  have  his  name 
connected  with  those  perversions  and 
misstatements  of  an  author's  meaning  in 
which  the  critic  now  indulges  without 
danger  of  being  turned  out  of  honest 
company.  He  will  be  in  some  degree 
forced  to  be  fair  and  just  with  a  book  he 
dislikes  ;  he  will  not  wish  to  misrepresent 
it  when  his  sin  can  be  traced  directly  to 
him  in  person ;  he  will  not  be  willing  to 
voice  the  prejudice  of  a  journal  which  is 
"  opposed  to  the  books  "  of  this  or  that 
author ;  and  the  journal  itself,  when  it  is 
no  longer  responsible  for  the  behavior  of 
its  critic,  may  find  it  interesting  and 
profitable  to  give  to  an  author  his  innings 


when  he  feels  wronged  by  a  reviewer  and 
desires  to  right  himself;  it  may  even  be 
eager  to  offer  him  the  opportunity.  We 
shall  then,  perhaps,  frequently  witness  the 
spectacle  of  authors  turning  upon  their 
reviewers,  and  improving  their  manners 
and  morals  by  confronting  them  in  public 
with  the  errors  they  may  now  commit 
with  impunity.  Many  an  author  smarts 
under  injuries  and  indignities  which  he 
might  resent  to  the  advantage  of  litera 
ture  and  civilization,  if  he  were  not  afraid 
of  being  browbeaten  by  the  journal  whose 
nameless  critic  has  outraged  him. 

The  public  is  now  of  opinion  that  it 
involves  loss  of  dignity  to  creative  tal 
ent  to  try  to  right  itself  if  wronged,  but 
here  we  are  without  the  requisite  sta 
tistics.  Creative  talent  may  come  off 
with  all  the  dignity  it  went  in  with,  and 
it  may  accomplish  a  very  good  work  in 
demolishing  criticism. 

In  any  other  relation  of  life  the  man 
who  thinks  himself  wronged  tries  to 
right  himself,  violently,  if  he  is  a  mistaken 
man,  and  lawfully  if  he  is  a  wise  man  or 
a  rich  one,  which  is  practically  the  same 


thing.  But  the  author,  dramatist,  paint 
er,  sculptor,  whose  book,  play,  picture, 
statue,  has  been  unfairly  dealt  with,  as 
he  believes,  must  make  no  effort  to  right 
himself  with  the  public ;  he  must  bear 
his  wrong  in  silence  ;  he  is  even  expected 
to  grin  and  bear  it,  as  if  it  were  funny. 
Everybody  understands  that  it  is  not  fun 
ny  to  him,  not  in  the  least  funny,  but 
everybody  says  that  he  cannot  make 
an  effort  to  get  the  public  to  take  his 
point  of  view  without  loss  of  dignity. 
This  is  very  odd,  but  it  is  the  fact,  and 
I  suppose  that  it  comes  from  the  feel 
ing  that  the  author,  dramatist,  painter, 
sculptor,  has  already  said  the  best  he 
can  for  his  side  in  his  book,  play,  pict 
ure,  statue.  This  is  partly  true,  and 
yet  if  he  wishes  to  add  something  more 
to  prove  the  critic  wrong,  we  do  not 
see  how  his  attempt  to  do  so  should 
involve  loss  of  dignity.  The  public, 
which  is  so  jealous  for  his  dignity,  does 
not  otherwise  use  him  as  if  he  were  a 
very  great  and  invaluable  creature  ;  if  he 
fails,  it  lets  him  starve  like  any  one  else. 
I  should  say  that  he  lost  dignity  or  not 


as  he  behaved,  in  his  effort  to  right  him 
self,  with  petulance  or  with  principle.  If 
he  betrayed  a  wounded  vanity,  if  he  im 
pugned  the  motives  and  accused  the  lives 
of  his  critics,  I  should  certainly  feel  that 
he  was  losing  dignity ;  but  if  he  tem 
perately  examined  their  theories,  and 
tried  to  show  where  they  were  mistaken, 
I  think  he  would  not  only  gain  dignity, 
but  would  perform  a  very  useful  work. 

The  temptation  for  a  critic  to  cut  fan 
tastic  tricks  before  high  heaven  in  the 
full  light  of  day  is  great  enough,  and  for 
his  own  sake  he  should  be  stripped  of 
the  shelter  of  the  dark.  Even  then  it 
will  be  long  before  the  evolution  is  com 
plete,  and  we  have  the  gentle,  dispassion 
ate,  scientific  student  of  current  literature 
who  never  imagines  that  he  can  direct  lit 
erature,  but  realizes  that  it  is  a  plant  which 
springs  from  the  nature  of  a  people,  and 
draws  its  forces  from  their  life,  that  its 
root  is  in  their  character,  and  that  it 
takes  form  from  their  will  and  taste. 


XIII 

)N  fine,  I  would  beseech  the 
literary  critics  of  our  coun 
try  to  disabuse  themselves  of 
the  mischievous  notion  that 
they  are  essential  to  the  pro 
gress  of  literature  in  the  way  critics  have 
vainly  imagined.  Canon  Farrar  confesses 
that  with  the  best  will  in  the  world  to  pro 
fit  by  the  many  criticisms  of  his  books,  he 
has  never  profited  in  the  least  by  any  of 
them ;  and  this  is  almost  the  universal 
experience  of  authors.  It  is  not  always 
the  fault  of  the  critics.  They  sometimes 
deal  honestly  and  fairly  by  a  book,  and 
not  so  often  they  deal  adequately.  But 
in  making  a  book,  if  it  is  at  all  a  good 
book,  the  author  has  learned  all  that  is 
knowable  about  it,  and  every  strong  point 
and  every  weak  point  in  it,  far  more  accu 
rately  than  any  one  else  can  possibly 
learn  them.  He  has  learned  to  do  better 


than  well  for  the  future ;  but  if  his  book 
is  bad,  he  cannot  be  taught  anything 
about  it  from  the  outside.  It  will  perish ; 
and  if  he  has  not  the  root  of  literature  in 
him,  he  will  perish  as  an  author  with  it. 

But  what  is  it  that  gives  tendency  in 
art,  then  ?  What  is  it  makes  people  like 
this  at  one  time,  and  that  at  another? 
Above  all,  what  makes  a  better  fashion 
change  for  a  worse ;  how  can  the  ugly 
come  to  be  preferred  to  the  beautiful ;  in 
other  words,  how  can  an  art  decay  ? 

This  question  came  up  in  my  mind 
lately  with  regard  to  English  fiction  and 
its  form,  or  rather  its  formlessness.  How, 
for  instance,  could  people  who  had  once 
known  the  simple  verity,  the  refined  per 
fection  of  Miss  Austen,  enjoy  anything 
less  refined  and  less  perfect  ? 

With  her  example  before  them,  why 
should  not  English  novelists  have  gone 
on  writing  simply,  honestly,  artistically, 
ever  after?  One  would  think  it  must 
have  been  impossible  for  them  to  do 
otherwise,  if  one  did  not  remember,  say, 
the  lamentable  behavior  of  the  actors 
who  support  Mr.  Jefferson,  and  their  the- 


atricality  in  the  very  presence  of  his  beau 
tiful  naturalness.  It  is  very  difficult,  that 
simplicity,  and  nothing  is  so  hard  as  to 
be  honest,  as  the  reader,  if  he  has  ever 
happened  to  try  it,  must  know.  "  The  big 
bow-wow  I  can  do  myself,  like  any  one 
going,"  said  Scott,  but  he  owned  that  the 
exquisite  touch  of  Miss  Austen  was  de 
nied  him  ;  and  it  seems  certainly  to  have 
been  denied  in  greater  or  less  measure  to 
all  her  successors.  But  though  reading 
and  writing  come  by  nature,  as  Dogberry 
justly  said,  a  taste  in  them  may  be  culti 
vated,  or  once  cultivated,  it  may  be  pre 
served  ;  and  why  was  it  not  so  among 
those  poor  islanders  ?  One  does  not  ask 
such  things  in  order  to  be  at  the  pains 
of  answering  them  one's  self,  but  with 
the  hope  that  some  one  else  will  take  the 
trouble  to  do  so,  and  I  propose  to  be 
rather  a  silent  partner  in  the  enterprise, 
which  I  shall  leave  mainly  to  Senor 
Armando  Palacio  Valdes.  This  delight 
ful  author  will,  however,  only  be  able  to 
answer  my  question  indirectly  from  the 
essay  on  fiction  with  which  he  prefaces 
one  of  his  novels,  the  charming  story  of 


59 


The  Sister  of  San  Sulphizo,  and  I  shall 
have  some  little  labor  in  fitting  his  saws 
to  my  instances.  It  is  an  essay  which  I 
wish  every  one  intending  to  read,  or  even 
to  write,  a  novel,  might  acquaint  himself 
with  ;  for  it  contains  some  of  the  best 
and  clearest  things  which  have  been  said 
of  the  art  of  fiction  in  a  time  when  nearly 
all  who  practise  it  have  turned  to  talk 
about  it. 

Sefior  Valdes  is  a  realist,  but  a  realist 
according  to  his  own  conception  of  real 
ism  ;  and  he  has  some  words  of  just  cen 
sure  for  the  French  naturalists,  whom  he 
finds  unnecessarily,  and  suspects  of  being 
sometimes  even  mercenarily,  nasty.  He 
sees  the  wide  difference  that  passes  be 
tween  this  naturalism  and  the  realism  of 
the  English  and  Spanish ;  and  he  goes 
somewhat  further  than  I  should  go  in 
condemning  it.  "  The  French  natural 
ism  represents  only  a  moment,  and  an 
insignificant  part  of  life.  ...  It  is  charac 
terized  by  sadness  and  narrowness.  The 
prototype  of  this  literature  is  the  Madame 
Bovary  of  Flaubert.  I  am  an  admirer  of 
this  novelist,  and  especially  of  this  novel ; 


r,o 


but  often  in  thinking  of  it  I  have  said, 
How  dreary  would  literature  be  if  it  were 
no  more  than  this  !  There  is  something 
antipathetic  and  gloomy  and  limited  in 
it,  as  there  is  in  modern  French  life ; " 
but  this  seems  to  me  exactly  the  best 
possible  reason  for  its  being.  I  believe 
with  Sefior  Valdes  that  "  no  literature 
can  live  long  without  joy,"  not  because  of 
its  mistaken  sesthetics,  however,  but  be 
cause  no  civilization  can  live  long  with 
out  joy.  The  expression  of  French  life 
will  change  when  French  life  changes ; 
and  French  naturalism  is  better  at  its 
worst  than  French  unnaturalism  at  its 
best.  "  No  one,"  as  Seiior  Valdes  truly 
says,  "  can  rise  from  the  perusal  of  a  nat 
uralistic  book  .  .  .  without  a  vivid  desire 
to  escape  "  from  the  wretched  world  de 
picted  in  it,  "  and  a  purpose,  more  or 
less  vague,  of  helping  to  better  the  lot 
and  morally  elevate  the  abject  beings 
who  figure  in  it.  Naturalistic  art,  then, 
is  not  immoral  in  itself,  for  then  it  would 
not  merit  the  name  of  art ;  for  though  it 
is  not  the  business  of  art  to  preach  moral 
ity,  still  I  think  that,  resting  on  a  divine 


and  spiritual  principle,  like  the  idea  of 
the  beautiful,  it  is  perforce  moral.  I  hold 
much  more  immoral  other  books  which, 
under  a  glamour  of  something  spiritual 
and  beautiful  and  sublime,  portray  the 
vices  in  which  we  are  allied  to  the  beasts. 
Such,  for  example,  are  the  works  of  Oc 
tave  Feuillet,  Arsene  Houssaye,  Georges 
Ohnet,  and  other  contemporary  novelists 
much  in  vogue  among  the  higher  classes 
of  society." 

But  what  is  this  idea  of  the  beautiful 
which  art  rests  upon,  and  so  becomes 
moral?  "The  man  of  our  time,"  says 
Seilor  Valdes,  "  wishes  to  know  every 
thing  and  enjoy  everything  :  he  turns  the 
objective  of  a  powerful  equatorial  towards 
the  heavenly  spaces  where  gravitate  the 
infinitude  of  the  stars,  just  as  he  applies 
the  microscope  to  the  infinitude  of  the 
smallest  insects  ;  for  their  laws  are  iden 
tical.  His  experience,  united  with  intui 
tion,  has  convinced  him  that  in  nature 
there  is  neither  great  nor  small ;  all  is 
equal.  All  is  equally  grand,  all  is  equally 
just,  all  is  equally  beautiful,  because  all  is 
equally  divine."  But  beauty,  Sefior  Val- 


des  explains,  exists  in  the  human  spirit, 
and  is  the  beautiful  effect  which  it  re 
ceives  from  the  true  meaning  of  things ; 
it  does  not  matter  what  the  things  are, 
and  it  is  the  function  of  the  artist  who 
feels  this  effect  to  impart  it  to  others.  I 
may  add  that  there  is  no  joy  in  art  except 
this  perception  of  the  meaning  of  things 
and  its  communication ;  when  you  have 
felt  it,  and  portrayed  it  in  a  poem,  a  sym 
phony,  a  novel,  a  statue,  a  picture,  an  ed 
ifice,  you  have  fulfilled  the  purpose  for 
which  you  were  born  an  artist. 

The  reflection  of  exterior  nature  in  the 
individual  spirit,  Sefior  Valdes  believes  to 
be  the  fundamental  of  art.  "  To  say, 
then,  that  the  artist  must  not  copy  but 
create  is  nonsense,  because  he  can  in  no 
wise  copy,  and  in  no  wise  create.  He 
who  sets  deliberately  about  modifying 
nature,  shows  that  he  has  not  felt  her 
beauty,  and  therefore  cannot  make  oth 
ers  feel  it.  The  puerile  desire  which 
some  artists  without  genius  manifest  to 
go  about  selecting  in  nature,  not  what 
seems  to  them  beautiful,  but  what  they 
think  will  seem  beautiful  to  others,  and 


rejecting  what  may  displease  them,  ordi 
narily  produces  cold  and  insipid  works. 
For,  instead  of  exploring  the  illimitable 
fields  of  reality,  they  cling  to  the  forms 
invented  by  other  artists  who  have  suc 
ceeded,  and  they  make  statues  of  statues, 
poems  of  poems,  novels  of  novels.  It  is 
entirely  false  that  the  great  romantic,  sym 
bolic,  or  classic  poets  modified  nature  ; 
such  as  they  have  expressed  her  they  felt 
her;  and  in  this  view  they  are  as  much 
realists  as  ourselves.  In  like  manner  if 
in  the  realistic  tide  that  now  bears  us  on 
there  are  some  spirits  who  feel  nature  in 
another  way,  in  the  romantic  way,  or  the 
classic  way,  they  would  not  falsify  her  in 
expressing  her  so.  Only  those  falsify  her 
who,  without  feeling  classic  wise  or  ro 
mantic  wise,  set  about  being  classic  or 
romantic,  wearisomely  reproducing  the 
models  of  former  ages  ;  and  equally  those 
who,  without  sharing  the  sentiment  of 
realism,  which  now  prevails,  force  them 
selves  to  be  realists  merely  to  follow  the 
fashion." 

The   pseudo-realists,  in    fact,  are   the 
worse  offenders,  to  my  thinking,  for  they 


sin  against  the  living ;  whereas  those 
who  continue  to  celebrate  the  heroic  ad 
ventures  of  Puss  in  Boots  and  the  hair 
breadth  escapes  of  Tom  Thumb,  under 
various  aliases,  only  cast  disrespect  upon 
the  immortals  who  have  passed  beyond 
these  noises. 


XIV 

I  HE  principal  cause,"  our 
Spaniard  says,  "of  the  de 
cadence  of  contemporary 
literature  is  found,  to  my 
thinking,  in  the  vice  which 
has  been  very  graphically  called  ef- 
fectism,  or  the  itch  of  awaking  at  all 
cost  in  the  reader  vivid  and  violent 
emotions,  which  shall  do  credit  to  the 
invention  and  originality  of  the  writer. 
This  vice  has  its  roots  in  human  nature 
itself,  and  more  particularly  in  that  of 
the  artist ;  he  has  always  something  fem 
inine  in  him,  which  tempts  him  to  coquet 
with  the  reader,  and  display  qualities  that 
he  thinks  will  astonish  him,  as  women 
laugh  for  no  reason,  to  show  their  teeth 
when  they  have  them  white  and  small 
and  even,  or  lift  their  dresses  to  show 
their  feet  when  there  is  no  mud  in  the 
street.  .  .  .  What  many  writers  nowadays 

5 


wish,  is  to  produce  an  effect,  grand  and 
immediate,  to  play  the  part  of  geniuses. 
For  this  they  have  learned  that  it  is  only 
necessary  to  write  exaggerated  works  in 
any  sort,  since  the  vulgar  do  not  ask  that 
they  shall  be  quietly  made  to  think  and 
feel,  but  that  they  shall  be  startled  ;  and 
among  the  vulgar,  of  course,  I  include  the 
great  part  of  those  who  write  literary 
criticism,  and  who  constitute  the  worst 
vulgar,  since  they  teach  what  they  do  not 
know.  .  .  .  There  are  many  persons  who 
suppose  that  the  highest  proof  an  artist 
can  give  of  his  fantasy  is  the  invention  of 
a  complicated  plot,  spiced  with  perils, 
surprises,  and  suspenses ;  and  that  any 
thing  else  is  the  sign  of  a  poor  and  tepid 
imagination.  And  not  only  people  who 
seem  cultivated,  but  are  not  so,  suppose 
this,  but  there  are  sensible  persons,  and 
even  sagacious  and  intelligent  critics,  who 
sometimes  allow  themselves  to  be  hood 
winked  by  the  dramatic  mystery  and  the 
surprising  and  fantastic  scenes  of  a  nov 
el.  They  own  it  is  all  false  ;  but  they 
admire  the  imagination,  what  they  call 
the  '  power '  of  the  author.  Very  well ; 


all  I  have  to  say  is  that  the  '  power '  to 
dazzle  with  strange  incidents,  to  enter 
tain  with  complicated  plots  and  impossi 
ble  characters,  now  belongs  to  some  hun 
dreds  of  writers  in  Europe ;  while  there 
are  not  much  above  a  dozen  who  know 
how  to  interest  with  the  ordinary  events 
of  life,  and  with  the  portrayal  of  charac 
ters  truly  human.  If  the  former  is  a  tal 
ent,  it  must  be  owned  that  it  is  much 
commoner  than  the  latter.  ...  If  we  are 
to  rate  novelists  according  to  their  fe 
cundity,  or  the  riches  of  their  invention, 
we  must  put  Alexander  Dumas  above 
Cervantes.  Cervantes  wrote  a  novel  with 
the  simplest  plot,  without  belying  much 
or  little  the  natural  and  logical  course  of 
events.  This  novel,  which  was  called 
Don  Quixote,  is  perhaps  the  greatest  work 
of  human  wit.  Very  well ;  the  same  Cer 
vantes,  mischievously  influenced  after 
wards  by  the  ideas  of  the  vulgar,  who 
were  then  what  they  are  now  and  always 
will  be,  attempted  to  please  them  by  a 
work  giving  a  lively  proof  of  his  invent 
ive  talent,  and  wrote  the  Persiles  and 
Sigismunda,  where  the  strange  incidents, 


68 


the  vivid  complications,  the  surprises,  the 
pathetic  scenes,  succeed  one  another  so 
rapidly  and  constantly  that  it  really  fa 
tigues  you.  .  .  .  But  in  spite  of  this  flood 
of  invention,  imagine,"  says  Seiior  Valdes, 
"  the  place  that  Cervantes  would  now  oc 
cupy  in  the  heaven  of  art,  if  he  had  never 
written  Don  Quixote,"  but  only  Persiles 
and  Sigismunda  ! 

From  the  point  of  view  of  modern 
English  criticism,  which  likes  to  be  melt 
ed,  and  horrified,  and  astonished,  and 
blood-curdled,  and  goose-fleshed,  no  less 
than  to  be  "  chippered  up "  in  fiction, 
Senor  Valdes  were  indeed  incorrigible. 
Not  only  does  he  despise  the  novel  of 
complicated  plot,  and  everywhere  prefer 
Don  Quixote  to  Persiles  and  Sigismunda, 
but  he  has  a  lively  contempt  for  another 
class  of  novels  much  in  favor  with  the 
gentilities  of  all  countries.  He  calls  their 
writers  "  novelists  of  the  world,"  and  he 
says  that  more  than  any  others  they  have 
the  rage  of  effectism.  "  They  do  not  seek 
to  produce  effect  by  novelty  and  inven 
tion  in  plot  .  .  .  they  seek  it  in  character. 
For  this  end  they  begin  by  deliberately 


falsifying  human  feelings,  giving  them  a 
paradoxical  appearance  completely  inad 
missible.  .  .  .  Love  that  disguises  itself 
as  hate,  incomparable  energy  under  the 
cloak  of  weakness,  virginal  innocence  un 
der  the  aspect  of  malice  and  impudence, 
wit  masquerading  as  folly,  etc.,  etc.  By 
this  means  they  hope  to  make  an  effect 
of  which  they  are  incapable  through  the 
direct,  frank,  and  conscientious  study  of 
character."  He  mentions  Octave  Feuil- 
let  as  the  greatest  offender  in  this  sort 
among  the  French,  and  Bulwer  among 
the  English ;  but  Dickens  is  full  of  it 
(Boffin  in  Our  Mutual  Friend  will  suffice 
for  all  example),  and  the  present  loath 
some  artistic  squalor  of  the  English  dra 
ma  is  witness  of  the  result  of  this  effect- 
ism  when  allowed  full  play. 

But  what,  then,  if  he  is  not  pleased 
with  Dumas,  or  with  the  effectists  who 
delight  genteel  people  at  all  the  theatres, 
and  in  most  of  the  romances,  what,  I  ask, 
will  satisfy  this  extremely  difficult  Spanish 
gentleman  ?  He  would  pretend,  very  lit 
tle.  Give  him  simple,  life-like  character; 
that  is  all  he  wants.  "  For  me,  the  only 


70 


condition  of  character  is  that  it  be  human, 
and  that  is  enough.  If  I  wished  to  know 
what  was  human,  I  should  study  human 
ity." 

But,  Senor  Valdes,  Sefior  Valdes  !  Do 
not  you  know  that  this  small  condition 
of  yours  implies  in  its  fulfilment  hardly 
less  than  the  gift  of  the  whole  earth,  with 
a  little  gold  fence  round  it  ?  You  merely 
ask  that  the  character  portrayed  in  fic 
tion  be  human ;  and  you  suggest  that 
the  novelist  should  study  humanity  if  he 
would  know  whether  his  personages  are 
human.  This  appears  to  me  the  crudest 
irony,  the  most  sarcastic  affectation  of 
humility.  If  you  had  asked  that  char 
acter  in  fiction  be  superhuman,  or  subter- 
human,  or  preterhuman,  or  intrahuman, 
and  had  bidden  the  novelist  go,  not  to 
humanity,  but  the  humanities,  for  the 
proof  of  his  excellence,  it  would  have 
been  all  very  easy.  The  books  are  full 
of  those  "creations,"  of  every  pattern,  of 
all  ages,  of  both  sexes ;  and  it  is  so  much 
handier  to  get  at  books  than  to  get  at 
men ;  and  when  you  have  portrayed 
"  passion "  instead  of  feeling,  and  used 


"power"  instead  of  common -sense,  and 
shown  yourself  a  "genius  "  instead  of  an 
artist,  the  applause  is  so  prompt  and  the 
glory  so  cheap,  that  really  anything  else 
seems  wickedly  wasteful  of  one's  time. 
One  may  not  make  one's  reader  enjoy  or 
suffer  nobly,  but  one  may  give  him  the 
kind  of  pleasure  that  arises  from  conjur 
ing,  or  from  a  puppetshow,  or  a  modern 
stage  play,  and  leave  him,  if  he  is  an  old 
fool,  in  the  sort  of  stupor  that  comes 
from  hitting  the  pipe  ;  or  if  he  is  a  young 
fool,  half  crazed  with  the  spectacle  of 
qualities  and  impulses  like  his  own  in  an 
apotheosis  of  achievement  and  fruition 
far  beyond  any  earthly  experience. 

But  apparently  Sefior  Valdes  would 
not  think  this  any  great  artistic  result. 
"Things  that  appear  ugliest  in  reality  to 
the  spectator  who  is  not  an  artist,  are 
transformed  into  beauty  and  poetry  when 
the  spirit  of  the  artist  possesses  itself  of 
them.  We  all  take  part  every  day  in  a 
thousand  domestic  scenes,  every  day  we 
see  a  thousand  pictures  in  life,  that  do 
not  make  any  impression  upon  us,  or  if 
they  make  any  it  is  one  of  repugnance ; 


but  let  the  novelist  come,  and  without 
betraying  the  truth,  but  painting  them 
as  they  appear  to  his  vision,  he  produces 
a  most  interesting  work,  whose  perusal 
enchants  us.  That  which  in  life  left  us 
indifferent,  or  repelled  us,  in  art  delights 
us.  Why?  Simply  because  the  artist 
has  made  us  see  the  idea  that  resides  in 
it.  Let  not  the  novelists,  then,  endeavor 
to  add  anything  to  reality,  to  turn  it  and 
twist  it,  to  restrict  it.  Since  nature  has 
endowed  them  with  this  precious  gift  of 
discovering  ideas  in  things,  their  work 
will  be  beautiful  if  they  paint  these  as 
they  appear.  But  if  the  reality  does  not 
impress  them,  in  vain  will  they  strive  to 
make  their  work  impress  others." 


XV 

HIGH  brings  us  again,  af 
ter  this  long  way  about,  to 
the  divine  Jane  and  her 
novels,  and  that  trouble 
some  question  about  them. 
She  was  great  and  they  were  beauti 
ful,  because  she  and  they  were  honest, 
and  dealt  with  nature  nearly  a  hun 
dred  years  ago  as  realism  deals  with 
it  to-day.  Realism  is  nothing  more  and 
nothing  less  than  the  truthful  treatment 
of  material,  and  Jane  Austen  was  the  first 
and  the  last  of  the  English  novelists  to 
treat  material  with  entire  truthfulness. 
Because  she  did  this,  she  remains  the 
most  artistic  of  the  English  novelists,  and 
alone  worthy  to  be  matched  with  the 
great  Scandinavian  and  Slavic  and  Latin 
artists.  It  is  not  a  question  of  intellect, 
or  not  wholly  that.  The  English  have 
mind  enough ;  but  they  have  not  taste 


enough ;  or,  rather,  their  taste  has  been 
perverted  by  their  false  criticism,  which 
is  based  upon  personal  preference,  and 
not  upon  principle ;  which  instructs  a 
man  to  think  that  what  he  likes  is  good, 
instead  of  teaching  him  first  to  distin 
guish  what  is  good  before  he  likes  it. 
The  art  of  fiction,  as  Jane  Austen  knew  it, 
declined  from  her  through  Scott,  and  Bul- 
wer,  and  Dickens,  and  Charlotte  Bronte, 
and  Thackeray,  and  even  George  Eliot, 
because  the  mania  of  romanticism  had 
seized  upon  all  Europe,  and  these  great 
writers  could  not  escape  the  taint  of 
their  time ;  but  it  has  shown  few  signs 
of  recovery  in  England,  because  English 
criticism,  in  the  presence  of  the  Conti 
nental  masterpieces,  has  continued  pro 
vincial  and  special  and  personal,  and  has 
expressed  a  love  and  a  hate  which  had 
to  do  with  the  quality  of  the  artist  rather 
than  the  character  of  his  work.  It  was 
inevitable  that  in  their  time  the  English 
romanticists  should  treat,  as  Senor  Val- 
des  says,  "  the  barbarous  customs  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  softening  and  disfiguring 
them,  as  Walter  Scott  and  his  kind  did  ;" 


75 


that  they  should  "  devote  themselves  to 
falsifying  nature,  refining  and  subtilizing 
sentiment,  and  modifying  psychology 
after  their  own  fancy,"  like  Bulwer  and 
Dickens,  as  well  as  like  Rousseau  and 
Madame  de  Statl,  not  to  mention  Balzac, 
the  worst  of  all  that  sort  at  his  worst. 
This  was  the  natural  course  of  the  dis 
ease  ;  but  it  really  seems  as  if  it  were 
their  criticism  that  was  to  blame  for  the 
rest :  not,  indeed,  for  the  performance  of 
this  writer  or  that,  for  criticism  can  never 
affect  the  actual  doing  of  a  thing ;  but 
for  the  esteem  in  which  this  writer  or 
that  is  held  through  the  perpetuation  of 
false  ideals.  The  only  observer  of  Eng 
lish  middle-class  life  since  Jane  Austen 
worthy  to  be  named  with  her  was  not 
George  Eliot,  who  was  first  ethical  and 
then  artistic,  who  transcended  her  in 
everything  but  the  form  and  method 
most  essential  to  art,  and  there  fell  hope 
lessly  below  her.  It  was  Anthony  Trol- 
lope  who  was  most  like  her  in  simple 
honesty  and  instinctive  truth,  as  unphi- 
losophized  as  the  light  of  common  day; 
but  he  was  so  warped  from  a  wholesome 


76 


ideal  as  to  wish  at  times  to  be  like  the 
caricaturist  Thackeray,  and  to  stand 
about  in  his  scene,  talking  it  over  with 
his  hands  in  his  pockets,  interrupting  the 
action,  and  spoiling  the  illusion  in  which 
alone  the  truth  of  art  resides.  Mainly, 
his  instinct  was  too  much  for  his  ideal, 
and  with  a  low  view  of  life  in  its  civic 
relations  and  a  thoroughly  bourgeois  soul, 
he  yet  produced  works  whose  beauty  is 
surpassed  only  by  the  effect  of  a  more 
poetic  writer  in  the  novels  of  Thomas 
Hardy.  Yet  if  a  vote  of  English  criti 
cism  even  at  this  late  day,  when  all  con 
tinental  Europe  has  the  light  of  aesthet 
ic  truth,  could  be  taken,  the  majority 
against  these  artists  would  be  overwhelm 
ingly  in  favor  of  a  writer  who  had  so 
little  artistic  sensibility,  that  he  never 
hesitated  on  any  occasion,  great  or  small, 
to  make  a  foray  among  his  characters, 
and  catch  them  up  to  show  them  to  the 
reader  and  tell  him  how  beautiful  or  ugly 
they  were  ;  and  cry  out  over  their  amaz 
ing  properties. 

Doubtless  the  ideal  of  those  poor  isl 
anders  will  be   finally   changed.     If  the 


77 


truth  could  become  a  fad  it  would  be  ac 
cepted  by  all  their  "  smart  people,"  but 
truth  is  something  rather  too  large  for 
that ;  and  we  must  await  the  gradual  ad 
vance  of  civilization  among  them.  Then 
they  will  see  that  their  criticism  has  mis 
led  them  ;  and  that  it  is  to  this  false 
guide  they  owe,  not  precisely  the  decline 
of  fiction  among  them,  but  its  contin 
ued  debasement  as  an  art. 


XVI 

OW  few  materials,"  says 
Emerson,  "  are  yet  used  by 
our  arts !  The  mass  of 
creatures  and  of  qualities 
are  still  hid  and  expect 
ant,"  and  to  break  new  ground  is  still 
one  of  the  uncommonest  and  most  he 
roic  of  the  virtues.  The  artists  are  not 
alone  to  blame  for  the  timidity  that  keeps 
them  in  the  old  furrows  of  the  worn-out 
fields ;  most  of  those  whom  they  live  to 
please,  or  live  by  pleasing,  prefer  to  have 
them  remain  there  ;  it  wants  rare  virtue 
to  appreciate  what  is  new,  as  well  as  to 
invent  it ;  and  the  "  easy  things  to  under 
stand  "  are  the  conventional  things.  This 
is  why  the  ordinary  English  novel,  with 
its  hackneyed  plot,  scenes,  and  figures,  is 
more  comfortable  to  the  ordinary  Ameri 
can  than  an  American  novel,  which  deals, 
at  its  worst,  with  comparatively  new  in- 


terests  and  motives.  To  adjust  one's  self 
to  the  enjoyment  of  these  costs  an  intel 
lectual  effort,  and  an  intellectual  effort  is 
what  no  ordinary  person  likes  to  make. 
It  is  only  the  extraordinary  person  who 
can  say,  with  Emerson  :  "  I  ask  not  for 
the  great,  the  remote,  the  romantic.  .  .  . 
I  embrace  the  common ;  I  sit  at  the  feet 
of  the  familiar  and  the  low.  .  .  .  Man  is 
surprised  to  find  that  things  near  are  not 
less  beautiful  and  wondrous  than  things 
remote.  .  .  .  The  perception  of  the  worth 
of  the  vulgar  is  fruitful  in  discoveries.  .  .  . 
The  foolish  man  wonders  at  the  unusual, 
but  the  wise  man  at  the  usual.  .  .  .To-day 
always  looks  mean  to  the  thoughtless ;  but 
to-day  is  a  king  in  disguise.  .  .  .  Banks 
and  tariffs,  the  newspaper  and  caucus, 
Methodism  and  Unitarianism,  are  flat 
and  dull  to  dull  people,  but  rest  on  the 
same  foundations  of  wonder  as  the  town 
of  Troy  and  the  temple  of  Delphos." 

Perhaps  we  ought  not  to  deny  their 
town  of  Troy  and  their  temple  of  Del 
phos  to  the  dull  people ;  but  if  we  ought, 
and  if  we  did,  they  would  still  insist  upon 
having  them.  An  English  novel,  full  of 


titles  and  rank,  is  apparently  essential  to 
the  happiness  of  such  people  ;  their  weak 
and  childish  imagination  is  at  home  in  its 
familiar  environment ;  they  know  what 
they  are  reading ;  the  fact  that  it  is  hash 
many  times  warmed  over  reassures  them  ; 
whereas  a  story  of  our  own  life,  honestly 
studied  and  faithfully  represented,  trou 
bles  them  with  varied  misgiving.  They 
are  not  sure  that  it  is  literature  ;  they  do 
not  feel  that  it  is  good  society ;  its  char 
acters,  so  like  their  own,  strike  them  as 
commonplace  ;  they  say  they  do  not  wish 
to  know  such  people. 

Everything  in  England  is  appreciable 
to  the  literary  sense,  while  the  sense  of 
the  literary  worth  of  things  in  America 
is  still  faint  and  weak  with  most  people, 
with  the  vast  majority  who  "  ask  for  the 
great,  the  remote,  the  romantic,"  who 
cannot  "  embrace  the  common,"  cannot 
"  sit  at  the  feet  of  the  familiar  and  the 
low,''  in  the  good  company  of  Emerson. 
We  are  all,  or  nearly  all,  struggling  to  be 
distinguished  from  the  mass,  and  to  be 
set  apart  in  select  circles  and  upper  class 
es  like  the  fine  people  we  have  read  about. 


We  are  really  a  mixture  of  the  plebeian 
ingredients  of  the  whole  world  ;  but  that 
is  not  bad  ;  our  vulgarity  consists  in  try 
ing  to  ignore  "  the  worth  of  the  vulgar," 
in  believing  that  the  superfine  is  better. 


XVII 

NOTHER  Spanish  novelist 
of  our  day,  whose  books 
have  given  me  great  pleas 
ure,  is  so  far  from  being 
of  the  same  mind  of  Senor 
Valdes  about  fiction  that  he  boldly  de 
clares  himself,  in  the  preface  to  his 
Pepita  Ximenez,  "an  advocate  of  art 
for  art's  sake."  I  heartily  agree  with 
him  that  it  is  "  in  very  bad  taste,  always 
impertinent  and  often  pedantic,  to  at 
tempt  to  prove  theses  by  writing  stories," 
and  yet  I  fancy  that  no  reader  whom 
Senor  Valera  would  care  to  please  could 
read  his  Pepita  Ximenez  without  finding 
himself  in  possession  of  a  great  deal  of 
serious  thinking  on  a  very  serious  subject, 
which  is  none  the  less  serious  because  it 
is  couched  in  terms  of  delicate  irony.  If  it 
is  true  that  "  the  object  of  a  novel  should 
be  to  charm  through  a  faithful  represen- 


tation  of  human  actions  and  human  pas 
sions,  and  to  create  by  this  fidelity  to 
nature  a  beautiful  work,"  and  if  "  the  cre 
ation  of  the  beautiful  "  is  solely  "  the  ob 
ject  of  art,"  it  never  was  and  never  can 
be  solely  its  effect  as  long  as  men  are  men 
and  women  are  women.  If  ever  the  race 
is  resolved  into  abstract  qualities,  per 
haps  this  may  happen ;  but  till  then  the 
finest  effect  of  the  "beautiful"  will  be 
ethical  and  not  aesthetic  merely.  Moral 
ity  penetrates  all  things,  it  is  the  soul  of 
all  things.  Beauty  may  clothe  it  on, 
whether  it  is  false  morality  and  an  evil 
soul,  or  whether  it  is  true  and  a  good 
soul.  In  the  one  case  the  beauty  will  cor 
rupt,  and  in  the  other  it  will  edify,  and  in 
either  case  it  will  infallibly  and  inevitably 
have  an  ethical  effect,  now  light,  now 
grave,  according  as  the  thing  is  light  or 
grave.  We  cannot  escape  from  this  ;  we 
are  shut  up  to  it  by  the  very  conditions 
of  our  being.  What  is  it  that  delights  us 
in  this  very  Pepita  Ximenez,  this  exqui 
site  masterpiece  of  Seuor  Valera's  ?  Not 
merely  that  a  certain  Luis  de  Vargas, 
dedicated  to  the  priesthood,  finds  a  cer- 


tain  Pepita  Ximcnez  lovelier  than  the 
priesthood,  and  abandons  all  his  sacer 
dotal  hopes  and  ambitions,  all  his  poetic 
dreams  of  renunciation  and  devotion,  to 
marry  her.  That  is  very  pretty  and  very 
true,  and  it  pleases ;  but  what  chiefly  ap 
peals  to  the  heart  is  the  assertion,  how 
ever  delicately  and  adroitly  implied,  that 
their  right  to  each  other  through  their 
love  was  far  above  his  vocation.  In  spite 
of  himself,  without  trying,  and  therefore 
without  impertinence  and  without  pedant 
ry,  Senor  Valera  has  proved  a  thesis  in  his 
story.  They  of  the  Church  will  acqui 
esce  with  the  reservation  of  Don  Luis's 
uncle  the  Dean  that  his  marriage  was 
better  than  his  vocation,  because  his  vo 
cation  was  a  sentimental  and  fancied  one ; 
we  of  the  Church-in-error  will  accept  the 
result  without  any  reservation  whatever ; 
and  I  think  we  shall  have  the  greater 
enjoyment  of  the  delicate  irony,  the  fine 
humor,  the  amusing  and  unfailing  subtle 
ty,  with  which  the  argument  is  enforced. 
In  recognizing  these,  however,  in  praising 
the  story  for  the  graphic  skill  with  which 
Southern  characters  and  passions  are  por- 


trayed  in  the  gay  light  of  an  Andalusian 
sky,  for  the  charm  with  which  a  fresh  and 
unhackneyed  life  is  presented,  and  the 
fidelity  with  which  novel  conditions  are 
sketched,  I  must  not  fail  to  add  that  the 
book  is  one  for  those  who  have  come  to 
the  knowledge  of  good  and  evil,  and  to 
confess  my  regret  that  it  fails  of  the 
remoter  truth,  "  the  eternal  amenities  " 
which  only  the  avowed  advocates  of  "art 
for  art's  sake"  seem  to  forget.  It  leaves 
the  reader  to  believe  that  Vargas  can  be 
happy  with  a  woman  who  wins  him  in 
Pepita's  way  ;  and  that  is  where  it  is  false 
both  to  life  and  to  art.  For  the  moment, 
it  is  charming  to  have  the  story  end  hap 
pily,  as  it  does,  but  after  one  has  lived  a 
certain  number  of  years,  and  read  a  cer 
tain  number  of  novels,  it  is  not  the  pros 
perous  or  adverse  fortune  of  the  char 
acters  that  affects  one,  but  the  good  or 
bad  faith  of  the  novelist  in  dealing  with 
them.  Will  he  play  us  false  or  will  he 
be  true  in  the  operation  of  this  or  that 
principle  involved  ?  I  cannot  hold  him 
to  less  account  than  this :  he  must  be 
true  to  what  life  has  taught  me  is  the 


86 


truth,  and  after  that  he  may  let  any  fate 
betide  his  people ;  the  novel  ends  well 
that  ends  faithfully.  The  greater  his 
power,  the  greater  his  responsibility  be 
fore  the  human  conscience,  which  is  God 
in  us.  But  men  come  and  go,  and  what 
they  do  in  their  limited  physical  lives  is 
of  comparatively  little  moment ;  it  is  what 
they  say  that  really  survives  to  bless  or 
to  ban;  and  it  is  the  evil  which  Words 
worth  felt  in  Goethe,  that  must  long  sur 
vive  him.  There  is  a  kind  of  thing — a 
kind  of  metaphysical  lie  against  right 
eousness  and  common-sense  —  which  is 
called  the  Unmoral,  and  is  supposed  to 
be  different  from  the  Immoral ;  and  it 
is  this  which  is  supposed  to  cover  many 
of  the  faults  of  Goethe.  His  Wilhelm 
Meister,  for  example,  is  so  far  removed 
within  the  region  of  the  "  ideal  "  that  its 
unprincipled,  its  evil-principled,  tenor  in 
regard  to  women  is  pronounced  "  unmo- 
rality,"and  is  therefore  inferably  harmless. 
But  no  study  of  Goethe  is  complete  with 
out  some  recognition  of  the  qualities 
which  caused  Wordsworth  to  hurl  the 
book  across  the  room  with  an  indignant 


perception  of  its  sensuality.  For  the  sins 
of  his  life  Goethe  was  perhaps  sufficiently 
punished  in  his  life  by  his  final  marriage 
with  Christiane;  for  the  sins  of  his  litera 
ture  many  others  must  suffer.  I  do  not 
despair,  however,  of  the  day  when  the  poor 
honest  herd  of  mankind  shall  give  univer 
sal  utterance  to  the  universal  instinct, 
and  shall  hold  selfish  power  in  politics, 
in  art,  in  religion,  for  the  devil  that  it 
is ;  when  neither  its  crazy  pride  nor  its 
amusing  vanity  shall  be  flattered  by  the 
puissance  of  the  "geniuses"  who  have 
forgotten  their  duty  to  the  common  weak 
ness,  and  have  abused  it  to  their  own 
glory.  In  that  day  we  shall  shudder  at 
many  monsters  of  passion,  of  self-indul 
gence,  of  heartlessness,  whom  we  still 
more  or  less  openly  adore  for  their  "  gen 
ius,"  and  shall  account  no  man  worship 
ful  whom  we  do  not  feel  and  know  to 
be  good.  The  spectacle  of  strenuous 
achievement  will  then  not  dazzle  or  mis 
lead  ;  it  will  not  sanctify  or  palliate  in 
iquity  ;  it  will  only  render  it  the  more 
hideous  and  pitiable. 

In  fact,  the  whole  belief  in  "genius" 


seems  to  me  rather  a  mischievous  super 
stition,  and  if  not  mischievous  always, 
still  always  a  superstition.  From  the  ac 
count  of  those  who  talk  about  it, "  genius  " 
appears  to  be  the  attribute  of  a  sort 
of  very  potent  and  admirable  prodigy 
which  God  has  created  out  of  the  com 
mon  for  the  astonishment  and  confusion 
of  the  rest  of  us  poor  human  beings.  But 
do  they  really  believe  it?  Do  they  mean 
anything  more  or  less  than  the  Mastery 
which  comes  to  any  man  according  to 
his  powers  and  diligence  in  any  direction? 
If  not,  why  not  have  an  end  of  the  super 
stition  which  has  caused  our  race  to  go 
on  so  long  writing  and  reading  of  the  dif 
ference  between  talent  and  genius  ?  It  is 
within  the  memory  of  middle-aged  men 
that  the  Maelstrom  existed  in  the  belief 
of  the  geographers,  but  we  now  get  on 
perfectly  well  without  it ;  and  why  should 
we  still  suffer  under  the  notion  of  "gen 
ius  "  which  keeps  so  many  poor  little  au- 
thorlings  trembling  in  question  whether 
they  have  it,  or  have  only  "  talent  ?" 

One  of  the  greatest  captains  who  ever 
lived — a  plain,  taciturn,  unaffected  soul — 


has  told  the  story  of  his  wonderful  life  as 
unconsciously  as  if  it  were  all  an  every 
day  affair,  not  different  from  other  lives, 
except  as  a  great  exigency  of  the  human 
race  gave  it  importance.  So  far  as  he 
knew,  he  had  no  natural  aptitude  for 
arms,  and  certainly  no  love  for  the  call 
ing.  But  he  went  to  West  Point  be 
cause,  as  he  quaintly  tells  us,  his  father 
"  rather  thought  he  would  go ;"  and  he 
fought  through  one  war  with  credit,  but 
without  glory.  The  other  war,  which  was 
to  claim  his  powers  and  his  science,  found 
him  engaged  in  the  most  prosaic  of  peace 
ful  occupations  ;  he  obeyed  its  call  because 
he  loved  his  country,  and  not  because 
he  loved  war.  All  the  world  knows  the 
rest,  and  all  the  world  knows  that  greater 
military  mastery  has  not  been  shown 
than  his  campaigns  illustrated.  He  does 
not  say  this  in  his  book,  or  hint  it  in  any 
way ;  he  gives  you  the  facts,  and  leaves 
them  with  you.  But  the  Personal  Me 
moirs  of  U.  S.  Grant,  written  as  simply 
and  straightforwardly  as  his  battles  were 
fought,  couched  in  the  most  unpreten 
tious  phrase,  with  never  a  touch  of  gran- 


diosity  or  attitudinizing,  familiar,  homely 
in  style,  form  a  great  piece  of  literature, 
because  great  literature  is  nothing  more 
nor  less  than  the  clear  expression  of 
minds  that  have  something  great  in  them, 
whether  religion,  or  beauty,  or  deep  expe 
rience.  Probably  Grant  would  have  said 
that  he  had  no  more  vocation  to  litera 
ture  than  he  had  to  war.  He  owns,  with 
something  like  contrition,  that  he  used 
to  read  a  great  many  novels ;  but  we 
think  he  would  have  denied  the  soft  im 
peachment  of  literary  power.  Neverthe 
less,  he  shows  it,  as  he  showed  military 
power,  unexpectedly,  almost  miraculous 
ly.  All  the  conditions  here,  then,  are 
favorable  to  supposing  a  case  of  "  genius." 
Yet  who  would  trifle  with  that  great  heir 
of  fame,  that  plain,  grand,  manly  soul, 
by  speaking  of  "genius"  and  him  togeth 
er?  Who  calls  Washington  a  genius? 
or  Franklin,  or  Bismarck,  or  Cavour,  or 
Columbus,  or  Luther,  or  Darwin,  or  Lin 
coln?  Were  these  men  second-rate  in 
their  way?  Or  is  "genius"  that  indefin 
able,  preternatural  quality,  sacred  to  the 
musicians,  the  painters,  the  sculptors,  the 


actors,  the  poets,  and  above  all,  the  poets  ? 
Or  is  it  that  the  poets,  having  most  of 
the  say  in  this  world,  abuse  it  to  shameless 
self-flattery,  and  would  persuade  the  in 
articulate  classes  that  they  are  on  pecul 
iar  terms  of  confidence  with  the  deity  ? 


XVIII 

>N  General  Grant's  confession 
of  novel-reading  there  is  a 
sort  of  inference  that  he  had 
wasted  his  time,  or  else  the 
guilty  conscience  of  the  nov 
elist  in  me  imagines  such  an  inference. 
But  however  this  may  be,  there  is  cer 
tainly  no  question  concerning  the  inten 
tion  of  a  correspondent  who  once  wrote 
to  me  after  reading  some  rather  brag 
ging  claims  I  had  made  for  fiction  as 
a  mental  and  moral  means.  "I  have 
very  grave  doubts,"  he  said,  "as  to  the 
whole  list  of  magnificent  things  that  you 
seem  to  think  novels  have  done  for  the 
race,  and  can  witness  in  myself  many 
evil  things  which  they  have  done  for  me. 
Whatever  in  my  mental  make-up  is  wild 
and  visionary,  whatever  is  untrue,  what 
ever  is  injurious,  I  can  trace  to  the  pe 
rusal  of  some  work  of  fiction.  Worse 


than  that,  they  beget  such  high-strung 
and  supersensitive  ideas  of  life  that  plain 
industry  and  plodding  perseverance  are 
despised,  and  matter-of-fact  poverty,  or 
every-day,  commonplace  distress,  meets 
with  no  sympathy,  if  indeed  noticed  at 
all,  by  one  who  has  wept  over  the  impos 
sibly  accumulated  sufferings  of  some  gau 
dy  hero  or  heroine." 

I  am  not  sure  that  I  had  the  contro 
versy  with  this  correspondent  that  he 
seemed  to  suppose ;  but  novels  are  now 
so  fully  accepted  by  every  one  pretending 
to  cultivated  taste — and  they  really  form 
the  whole  intellectual  life  of  such  im 
mense  numbers  of  people,  without  ques 
tion  of  their  influence,  good  or  bad,  upon 
the  mind — that  it  is  refreshing  to  have 
them  frankly  denounced,  and  to  be  invit 
ed  to  revise  one's  ideas  and  feelings  in 
regard  to  them.  A  little  honesty,  or  a 
great  deal  of  honesty,  in  this  quest  will 
do  the  novel,  as  we  hope  yet  to  have  it, 
and  as  we  have  already  begun  to  have  it, 
no  harm  ;  and  for  my  own  part  I  will 
confess  that  I  believe  fiction  in  the  past 
to  have  been  largely  injurious,  as  I  be- 


lieve  the  stage  play  to  be  still  almost 
wholly  injurious,  through  its  falsehood, 
its  folly,  its  wantonness,  and  its  aimless- 
ness.  It  may  be  safely  assumed  that  most 
of  the  novel-reading  which  people  fancy 
an  intellectual  pastime  is  the  emptiest  dis 
sipation,  hardly  more  related  to  thought 
or  the  wholesome  exercise  of  the  mental 
faculties  than  opium  -  eating  ;  in  either 
case  the  brain  is  drugged,  and  left  weaker 
and  crazier  for  the  debauch.  .If  this  may 
be  called  the  negative  result  of  the  fiction 
habit,  the  positive  injury  that  most  nov 
els  work  is  by  no  means  so  easily  to  be 
measured  in  the  case  of  young  men  whose 
character  they  help  so  much  to  form  or 
deform,  and  the  women  of  all  ages  whom 
they  keep  so  much  in  ignorance  of  the 
world  they  misrepresent.  Grown  men 
have  little  harm  from  them,  but  in  the 
other  cases,  which  are  the  vast  majority, 
they  hurt  because  they  are  not  true— not 
because  they  are  malevolent,  but  because 
they  are  idle  lies  about  human  nature 
and  the  social  fabric,  which  it  behooves 
us  to  know  and  to  understand,  that  we 
may  deal  justly  with  ourselves  and  with 


one  another.  One  need  not  go  so  far  as 
our  correspondent,  and  trace  to  the  fic 
tion  habit  "  whatever  is  wild  and  vision 
ary,  whatever  is  untrue,  whatever  is  inju 
rious,"  in  one's  life  ;  bad  as  the  fiction 
habit  is  it  is  probably  not  responsible  for 
the  whole  sum  of  evil  in  its  victims,  and 
I  believe  that  if  the  reader  will  use  care 
in  choosing  from  this  fungus-growth  with 
which  the  fields  of  literature  teem  every 
day,  he  may  nourish  himself  as  with  the 
true  mushroom,  at  no  risk  from  the  poi 
sonous  species. 

The  tests  are  very  plain  and  simple,  and 
they  are  perfectly  infallible.  If  a  novel 
flatters  the  passions,  and  exalts  them 
above  the  principles,  it  is  poisonous ;  it 
may  not  kill,  but  it  will  certainly  injure ; 
and  this  test  will  alone  exclude  an  entire 
class  of  fiction,  of  which  eminent  exam 
ples  will  occur  to  all.  Then  the  whole 
spawn  of  so-called  unmoral  romances, 
which  imagine  a  world  where  the  sins  of 
sense  are  unvisited  by  the  penalties  fol 
lowing,  swift  or  slow,  but  inexorably  sure, 
in  the  real  world,  are  deadly  poison : 
these  do  kill.  The  novels  that  merely 


tickle  our  prejudices  and  lull  our  judg 
ment,  or  that  coddle  our  sensibilities  or 
pamper  our  gross  appetite  for  the  marvel 
lous  are  not  so  fatal,  but  they  are  innutri- 
tious,  and  clog  the  soul  with  unwhole 
some  vapors  of  all  kinds.  No  doubt  they 
too  help  to  weaken  the  moral  fibre,  and 
make  their  readers  indifferent  to  "  plod 
ding  perseverance  and  plain  industry," 
and  to  "  matter-of-fact  poverty  and  com 
monplace  distress." 

Without  taking  them  too  seriously,  it 
still  must  be  owned  that  the  "  gaudy  hero 
and  heroine  "  are  to  blame  for  a  great 
deal  of  harm  in  the  world.  That  heroine 
long  taught  by  example,  if  not  precept, 
that  Love,  or  the  passion  or  fancy  she 
mistook  for  it,  was  the  chief  interest  of  a 
life,  which  is  really  concerned  with  a  great 
many  other  things ;  that  it  was  lasting 
in  the  way  she  knew  it ;  that  it  was  wor 
thy  of  every  sacrifice,  and  was  altogether 
a  finer  thing  than  prudence,  obedience, 
reason  ;  that  love  alone  was  glorious  and 
beautiful,  and  these  were  mean  and  ugly 
in  comparison  with  it.  More  lately  she 
has  begun  to  idolize  and  illustrate  Duty, 


and  she  is  hardly  less  mischievous  in  this 
new  role,  opposing  duty,  as  she  did  love, 
to  prudence,  obedience,  and  reason.  The 
stock  hero,  whom,  if  we  met  him,  we 
could  not  fail  to  see  was  a  most  deplo 
rable  person,  has  undoubtedly  imposed 
himself  upon  the  victims  of  the  fiction 
habit  as  admirable.  With  him,  too,  love 
was  and  is  the  great  affair,  whether  in  its 
old  romantic  phase  of  chivalrous  achieve 
ment  or  manifold  suffering  for  love's  sake, 
or  its  more  recent  development  of  the 
"virile,"  the  bullying,  and  the  brutal,  or 
its  still  more  recent  agonies  of  self-sacri 
fice,  as  idle  and  useless  as  the  moral  ex 
periences  of  the  insane  asylums.  With 
his  vain  posturings  and  his  ridiculous 
splendor  he  is  really  a  painted  barbarian, 
the  prey  of  his  passions  and  his  delusions, 
full  of  obsolete  ideals,  and  the  motives 
and  ethics  of  a  savage,  which  the  guilty 
author  of  his  being  does  his  best— or  his 
worst  —  in  spite  of  his  own  light  and 
knowledge,  to  foist  upon  the  reader  as 
something  generous  and  noble.  I  am 
not  merely  bringing  this  charge  against 
that  sort  of  fiction  which  is  beneath  lit- 


erature  and  outside  of  it,  "  the  shoreless 
lakes  of  ditch-water,"  whose  miasms  fill 
the  air  below  the  empyrean  where  the 
great  ones  sit ;  but  I  am  accusing  the 
work  of  some  of  the  most  famous,  who 
have,  in  this  instance  or  in  that,  sinned 
against  the  truth,  which  can  alone  exalt 
and  purify  men.  I  do  not  say  that  they 
have  constantly  done  so,  or  even  com 
monly  done  so  ;  but  that  they  have  done 
so  at  all  marks  them  as  of  the  past,  to  be 
read  with  the  due  historical  allowance 
for  their  epoch  and  their  conditions.  For 
I  believe  that,  while  inferior  writers  will 
and  must  continue  to  imitate  them  in 
their  foibles  and  their  errors,  no  one  here 
after  will  be  able  to  achieve  greatness 
who  is  false  to  humanity,  either  in  its 
facts  or  its  duties.  The  light  of  civil 
ization  has  already  broken  even  upon  the 
novel,  and  no  conscientious  man  can  now 
set  about  painting  an  image  of  life  with 
out  perpetual  question  of  the  verity  of 
his  work,  and  without  feeling  bound  to 
distinguish  so  clearly  that  no  reader  of 
his  may  be  misled,  between  what  is  right 
and  what  is  wrong,  what  is  noble  and 


what  is  base,  what  is  health  and  what 
is  perdition,  in  the  actions  and  the  char 
acters  he  portrays. 

The  fiction  that  aims  merely  to  enter 
tain — the  fiction  that  is  to  serious  fiction 
as  the  opera-bouffe,  the  ballet,  and  the 
pantomime  are  to  the  true  drama — need 
not  feel  the  burden  of  this  obligation 
so  deeply ;  but  even  such  fiction  will  not 
be  gay  or  trivial  to  any  reader's  hurt,  and 
criticism  will  hold  it  to  account  if  it 
passes  from  painting  to  teaching  folly. 

More  and  more  not  only  the  criticism 
which  prints  its  opinions,  but  the  infinite 
ly  vaster  and  powerfuler  criticism  which 
thinks  and  feels  them  merely,  will  make 
this  demand.  I  confess  that  I  do  not 
care  to  judge  any  work  of  the  imagina 
tion  without  first  of  all  applying  this  test 
to  it.  We  must  ask  ourselves  before  we 
ask  anything  else,  Is  it  true  ? — true  to  the 
motives,  the  impulses,  the  principles  that 
shape  the  life  of  actual  men  and  wom 
en  ?  This  truth,  which  necessarily  in 
cludes  the  highest  morality  and  the  high 
est  artistry — this  truth  given,  the  book 
cannot  be  wicked  and  cannot  be  weak ; 


and  without  it  all  graces  of  style  and  feats 
of  invention  and  cunning  of  construction 
are  so  many  superfluities  of  naughtiness. 
It  is  well  for  the  truth  to  have  all  these, 
and  shine  in  them,  but  for  falsehood  they 
are  merely  meretricious,  the  bedizenment 
of  the  wanton ;  they  atone  for  nothing, 
they  count  for  nothing.  But  in  fact  they 
come  naturally  of  truth,  and  grace  it  with 
out  solicitation ;  they  are  added  unto  it. 
In  the  whole  range  of  fiction  we  know  of 
no  true  picture  of  life — that  is,  of  human 
nature — which  is  not  also  a  masterpiece 
of  literature,  full  of  divine  and  natural 
beauty.  It  may  have  no  touch  or  tint  of 
this  special  civilization  or  of  that ;  it  had 
better  have  this  local  color  well  ascertain 
ed  ;  but  the  truth  is  deeper  and  finer  than 
aspects,  and  if  the  book  is  true  to  what 
men  and  women  know  of  one  another's 
souls  it  will  be  true  enough,  and  it  will  be 
great  and  beautiful.  It  is  the  conception 
of  literature  as  something  apart  from  life, 
supeninely  aloof,  which  makes  it  really 
unimportant  to  the  great  mass  of  man 
kind,  without  a  message  or  a  meaning  for 
them ;  and  it  is  the  notion  that  a  novel 


may  be  false  in  its  portrayal  of  causes  and 
effects  that  makes  literary  art  contempt 
ible  even  to  those  whom  it  amuses,  that 
forbids  them  to  regard  the  novelist  as  a 
serious  or  right-minded  person.  If  they 
do  not  in  some  moment  of  indignation 
cry  out  against  all  novels,  as  my  corre 
spondent  does,  they  remain  besotted  in  the 
fume  of  the  delusions  purveyed  to  them, 
with  no  higher  feeling  for  the  author  than 
such  maudlin  affection  as  the  habitue  of 
an  opium-joint  perhaps  knows  for  the  at 
tendant  who  fills  his  pipe  with  the  drug. 

Or,  as  in  the  case  of  another  corre 
spondent  who  writes  that  in  his  youth  he 
"  read  a  great  many  novels,  but  always 
regarded  it  as  an  amusement,  like  horse- 
racing  and  card-playing,"  for  which  he 
had  no  time  when  he  entered  upon  the 
serious  business  of  life,  it  renders  them 
merely  contemptuous.  His  view  of  the 
matter  may  be  commended  to  the  broth 
erhood  and  sisterhood  of  novelists  as  full 
of  wholesome  if  bitter  suggestion  ;  and 
\ve  urge  them  not  to  dismiss  it  with  high 
literary  scorn  as  that  of  some  Boeotian 
dull  to  the  beauty  of  art.  Refuse  it  as  we 


may,  it  is  still  the  feeling  of  the  vast  ma 
jority  of  people  for  whom  life  is  earnest, 
and  who  find  only  a  distorted  and  mis 
leading  likeness  of  it  in  our  books.  We 
may  fold  ourselves  in  our  scholars'  gowns, 
and  close  the  doors  of  our  studies,  and  af 
fect  to  despise  this  rude  voice ;  but  we  can 
not  shut  it  out.  It  comes  to  us  from  wher 
ever  men  are  at  work,  from  wherever  they 
are  truly  living,  and  accuses  us  of  unfaith 
fulness,  of  triviality,  of  mere  stage-play ; 
and  none  of  us  can  escape  conviction 
except  he  prove  himself  worthy  of  his 
time — a  time  in  which  the  great  masters 
have  brought  literature  back  to  life,  and 
filled  its  ebbing  veins  with  the  red  tides 
of  reality.  We  cannot  all  equal  them  ; 
we  need  not  copy  them ;  but  we  can  all 
go  to  the  sources  of  their  inspiration  and 
their  power ;  and  to  draw  from  these  no 
one  need  go  far — no  one  need  really  go 
out  of  himself. 

Fifty  years  ago,  Carlyle,  in  whom  the 
truth  was  always  alive,  but  in  \vhom  it 
was  then  unperverted  by  suffering,  by  ce 
lebrity,  and  by  despair,  wrote  in  his  study 
of  Diderot :  "  Were  it  not  reasonable  to 


prophesy  that  this  exceeding  great  multi 
tude  of  novel-writers  and  such  like  must, 
in  a  new  generation,  gradually  do  one  of 
two  things  :  either  retire  into  the  nurser 
ies,  and  work  for  children,  minors,  and 
semi-fatuous  persons  of  both  sexes,  or 
else,  what  were  far  better,  sweep  their 
novel-fabric  into  the  dust-cart,  and  betake 
themselves  with  such  faculty  as  they  have 
to  understand  and  record  what  is  true,  of 
which  surely  there  is,  and  will  forever  be, 
a  whole  infinitude  unknown  to  us  of  in 
finite  importance  to  us?  Poetry,  it  will 
more  and  more  come  to  be  understood, 
is  nothing  but  higher  knowledge;  and 
the  only  genuine  Romance  (for  grown 
persons),  Reality." 

If,  after  half  a  century,  fiction  still 
mainly  works  for  "  children,  minors,  and 
semi-fatuous  persons  of  both  sexes,"  it  is 
nevertheless  one  of  the  hopefulest  signs  of 
the  world's  progress  that  it  has  begun  to 
work  for  "grown  persons,"  and  if  not  ex 
actly  in  the  way  that  Carlyle  might  have 
solely  intended  in  urging  its  writers  to 
compile  memoirs  instead  of  building  the 
"  novel-fabric,"  still  it  has,  in  the  highest 


and  widest  sense,  already  made  Reality  its 
Romance.  I  cannot  judge  it,  I  do  not 
even  care  for  it,  except  as  it  has  done  this ; 
and  I  can  hardly  conceive  of  a  literary 
self-respect  in  these  days  compatible  with 
the  old  trade  of  make-believe,  with  the 
production  of  the  kind  of  fiction  which 
is  too  much  honored  by  classification 
with  card-playing  and  horse-racing.  But 
let  fiction  cease  to  lie  about  life ;  let  it 
portray  men  and  women  as  they  are,  act 
uated  by  the  motives  and  the  passions 
in  the  measure  we  all  know ;  let  it  leave 
off  painting  dolls  and  working  them  by 
springs  and  wires  ;  let  it  show  the  differ 
ent  interests  in  their  true  proportions ; 
let  it  forbear  to  preach  pride  and  revenge, 
folly  and  insanity,  egotism  and  prejudice, 
but  frankly  own  these  for  what  they  are, 
in  whatever  figures  and  occasions  they 
appear ;  let  it  not  put  on  fine  literary 
airs  ;  let  it  speak  the  dialect,  the  language, 
that  most  Americans  know — the  language 
of  unaffected  people  everywhere  —  and 
there  can  be  no  doubt  of  an  unlimited 
future,  not  only  of  delightfulness  but  of 
usefulness,  for  it. 


XIX 


is  what  I  say  in  my  se 
verer  moods,  but  at  other 
times  I  know  that,  of  course, 
no  one  is  going  to  hold  all 
fiction  to  such  strict  account. 
There  is  a  great  deal  of  it  which  may  be 
very  well  left  to  amuse  us,  if  it  can,  when 
we  are  sick  or  when  we  are  silly,  and  I  am 
not  inclined  to  despise  it  in  the  perform 
ance  of  this  office.  Or,  if  people  find  pleas 
ure  in  having  their  blood  curdled  for  the 
sake  of  having  it  uncurdled  again  at  the 
end  of  the  book,  I  would  not  interfere  with 
their  amusement,  though  I  do  not  de 
sire  it.  There  is  a  certain  demand  in  prim 
itive  natures  for  the  kind  of  fiction  that 
does  this,  and  the  author  of  it  is  usually 
very  proud  of  it.  The  kind  of  novels  he 
likes,  and  likes  to  write,  are  intended  to 
take  his  reader's  mind,  or  what  that  read 
er  would  probably  call  his  mind,  off  him- 


self ;  they  make  one  forget  life  and  all  its 
cares  and  duties ;  they  are  not  in  the  least 
like  the  novels  which  make  you  think  of 
these,  and  shame  you  into  at  least  wishing 
to  be  a  helpfuler  and  wholesomer  creature 
than  you  are.  No  sordid  details  of  veri 
ty  here,  if  you  please ;  no  wretched  being 
humbly  and  weakly  struggling  to  do  right 
and  to  be  true,  suffering  for  his  follies  and 
his  sins,  tasting  joy  only  through  the  mor 
tification  of  self,  and  in  the  help  of  others  ; 
nothing  of  all  this,  but  a  great,  whirling 
splendor  of  peril  and  achievement,  a  wild 
scene  of  heroic  adventure  and  of  emotion 
al  ground  and  lofty  tumbling,  with  a  stage 
"  picture  "  at  the  fall  of  the  curtain,  and 
all  the  good  characters  in  a  row,  their  left 
hands  pressed  upon  their  hearts,  and  kiss 
ing  their  right  hands  to  the  audience,  in 
the  good  old  way  that  has  always  charmed 
and  always  will  charm,  Heaven  bless  it ! 

In  a  world  which  loves  the  spectacular 
drama  and  the  practically  bloodless  sports 
of  the  modern  amphitheatre  the  author 
of  this  sort  of  fiction  has  his  place,  and 
we  must  not  seek  to  destroy  him  because 
he  fancies  it  the  first  place.  In  fact,  it  is 


io7 


a  condition  of  his  doing  well  the  kind  of 
work  he  does  that  he  should  think  it  im 
portant,  that  he  should  believe  in  him 
self;  and  I  would  not  take  away  this  faith 
of  his,  even  if  I  could.  As  I  say,  he  has 
his  place.  The  world  often  likes  to  for 
get  itself,  and  he  brings  on  his  heroes,  his 
goblins,  his  feats,  his  hair-breadth  escapes, 
his  imminent  deadly  breaches,  and  the 
poor,  foolish,  childish  old  world  renews 
the  excitements  of  its  nonage.  Perhaps 
this  is  a  work  of  beneficence;  and  per 
haps  our  brave  conjurer  in  his  cabalistic 
robe  is  a  philanthropist  in  disguise. 

Within  the  last  four  or  five  years  there 
has  been  throughout  the  whole  English- 
speaking  world  what  Mr.  Grant  Allen 
happily  calls  the  "  recrudescence  "  of  taste 
in  fiction.  The  effect  is  less  noticeable 
in  America  than  in  England,  where  effete 
Philistinism,  conscious  of  the  dry-rot  of 
its  conventionality,  is  casting  about  for 
cure  in  anything  that  is  wild  and  strange 
and  unlike  itself.  But  the  recrudescence 
has  been  evident  enough  here,  too ;  and 
a  writer  in  one  of  our  periodicals  has  put 
into  convenient  shape  some  common  er- 


io8 


rors  concerning  popularity  as  a  test  of 
merit  in  a  book.  He  seems  to  think,  for 
instance,  that  the  love  of  the  marvellous 
and  impossible  in  fiction,  which  is  shown 
not  only  by  "the  unthinking  multitude 
clamoring  about  the  book  counters  "  for 
fiction  of  that  sort,  but  by  the  "  literary 
elect "  also,  is  proof  of  some  principle  in 
human  nature  which  ought  to  be  respect 
ed  as  well  as  tolerated.  He  seems  to  be 
lieve  that  the  ebullition  of  this  passion 
forms  a  sufficient  answer  to  those  who  say 
that  art  should  represent  life,  and  that  the 
art  which  misrepresents  life  is  feeble  art 
and  false  art.  But  it  appears  to  me  that 
a  little  carefuler  reasoning  from  a  little 
closer  inspection  of  the  facts  would  not 
have  brought  him  to  these  conclusions.  In 
the  first  place,  I  doubt  very  much  whether 
the  "  literary  elect"  have  been  fascinated 
in  great  numbers  by  the  fiction  in  question  ; 
but  if  I  supposed  them  to  have  really  fallen 
under  that  spell,  I  should  still  be  able  to 
account  for  their  fondness  and  that  of  the 
"  unthinking  multitude  "  upon  the  same 
grounds,  without  honoring  either  very 
much.  It  is  the  habit  of  hasty  casuists 


io9 


to  regard  civilization  as  inclusive  of  all 
the  members  of  a  civilized  community ; 
but  this  is  a  palpable  error.  Many  per 
sons  in  every  civilized  community  live  in 
a  state  of  more  or  less  evident  savagery 
with  respect  to  their  habits,  their  morals, 
and  their  propensities  ;  and  they  are  held 
in  check  only  by  the  law.  Many  more 
yet  are  savage  in  their  tastes,  as  they 
show  by  the  decoration  of  their  houses 
and  persons,  and  by  their  choice  of  books 
and  pictures ;  and  these  are  left  to  the 
restraints  of  public  opinion.  In  fact,  no 
man  can  be  said  to  be  thoroughly  civ 
ilized  or  always  civilized  ;  the  most  re- 
lined,  the  most  enlightened  person  has 
his  moods,  his  moments  of  barbarism,  in 
which  the  best,  or  even  the  second  best, 
shall  not  please  him.  At  these  times  the 
lettered  and  the  unlettered  are  alike  prim 
itive  and  their  gratifications  are  of  the 
same  simple  sort ;  the  highly  cultivated 
person  may  then  like  melodrama,  impos 
sible  fiction,  and  the  trapeze  as  sincerely 
and  thoroughly  as  a  boy  of  thirteen  or  a 
barbarian  of  any  age. 

I  do  not  blame  him  for  these  moods ;  I 


find  something  instructive  and  interest 
ing  in  them  ;  but  if  they  lastingly  es 
tablished  themselves  in  him,  I  could  not 
help  deploring  the  state  of  that  person. 
No  one  can  really  think  that  the  "lit 
erary  elect,"  who  are  said  to  have  join 
ed  the  "unthinking  multitude"  in  clam 
oring  about  the  book  counters  for  the 
romances  of  no-man's  land,  take  the  same 
kind  of  pleasure  in  them  as  they  do  in 
a  novel  of  Tolstoi,  Tourgueneff,  George 
Eliot,  Thackeray,  Balzac,  Manzoni,  Haw 
thorne,  Henry  James,  Thomas  Hardy,  Pa- 
lacio  Valdes,  or  even  Walter  Scott.  They 
have  joined  the  "unthinking  multitude," 
perhaps  because  they  are  tired  of  think 
ing,  and  expect  to  find  relaxation  in  feel 
ing — feeling  crudely,  grossly,  merely.  For 
once  in  a  way  there  is  no  great  harm  in 
this ;  perhaps  no  harm  at  all.  It  is  per 
fectly  natural ;  let  them  have  their  in 
nocent  debauch.  But  let  us  distinguish, 
for  our  own  sake  and  guidance,  between 
the  different  kinds  of  things  that  please 
the  same  kind  of  people ;  between  the 
things  that  please  them  habitually  and 
those  that  please  them  occasionally ;  be- 


tween  the  pleasures  that  edify  them  and 
those  that  amuse  them.  Otherwise  we 
shall  be  in  danger  of  becoming  perma 
nently  part  of  the  "  unthinking  multi 
tude,"  and  of  remaining  puerile,  primitive, 
savage.  We  shall  be  so  in  moods  and  at 
moments  ;  but  let  us  not  fancy  that  those 
are  high  moods  or  fortunate  moments. 
If  they  are  harmless,  that  is  the  most 
that  can  be  said  for  them.  They  are 
lapses  from  which  we  can  perhaps  go  for 
ward  more  vigorously ;  but  even  this  is 
not  certain. 

My  own  philosophy  of  the  matter,  how 
ever,  would  not  bring  me  to  prohibition 
of  such  literary  amusements  as  the  writ 
er  quoted  seems  to  find  significant  of  a 
growing  indifference  to  truth  and  sanity 
in  fiction.  Once  more,  I  say,  these  amuse 
ments  have  their  place,  as  the  circus  has, 
and  the  burlesque  and  negro  minstrelsy, 
and  the  ballet,  and  prestidigitation.  No 
one  of  these  is  to  be  despised  in  its 
place  ;  but  we  had  better  understand  that 
it  is  not  the  highest  place,  and  that  it  is 
hardly  an  intellectual  delight.  The  lapse 
of  all  the  "literary  elect"  in  the  world 


could  not  dignify  unreality ;  and  their 
present  mood,  if  it  exists,  is  of  no  more 
weight  against  that  beauty  in  literature 
which  comes  from  truth  alone,  and  never 
can  come  from  anything  else,  than  the 
permanent  state  of  the  "  unthinking  mul 
titude." 

Yet  even  as  regards  the  "  unthinking 
multitude,"  I  believe  I  am  not  able  to 
take  the  attitude  of  the  writer  I  have 
quoted.  I  am  afraid  that  I  respect  them 
more  than  he  would  like  to  have  me, 
though  I  cannot  always'respect  their  taste, 
any  more  than  that  of  the  "  literary  elect." 
I  respect  them  for  their  good  sense  in 
most  practical  matters ;  for  their  labo 
rious,  honest  lives;  for  their  kindness, 
their  good-will ;  for  that  aspiration  tow 
ards  something  better  than  themselves 
which  seems  to  stir,  however  dumbly,  in 
every  human  breast  not  abandoned  to  lit 
erary  pride  or  other  forms  of  self-right 
eousness.  I  find  every  man  interesting, 
whether  he  thinks  or  unthinks,  whether 
he  is  savage  or  civilized ;  for  this  reason 
I  cannot  thank  the  novelist  who  teaches 
us  not  to  know  but  to  unknow  our  kind. 


Yet  I  should  by  no  means  hold  him  to 
such  strict  account  as  Emerson,  who  felt 
the  absence  of  the  best  motive,  even  in 
the  greatest  of  the  masters,  when  he  said 
of  Shakespeare  that,  after  all,  he  was  only 
master  of  the  revels.  The  judgment  is 
so  severe,  even  with  the  praise  which  pre 
cedes  it,  that  one  winces  under  it ;  and  if 
one  is  still  young,  with  the  world  gay  be 
fore  him,  and  life  full  of  joyous  promise, 
one  is  apt  to  ask,  defiantly,  Well,  what  is 
better  than  being  such  a  master  of  the 
revels  as  Shakespeare  was  ?  Let  each 
judge  for  himself.  To  the  heart  again  of 
serious  youth  uncontaminate  and  exigent 
of  ideal  good,  it  must  always  be  a  grief 
that  the  great  masters  seem  so  often  to 
have  been  willing  to  amuse  the  leisure 
and  vacancy  of  meaner  men,  and  leave 
their  mission  to  the  soul  but  partially  ful 
filled.  This,  perhaps,  was  what  Emerson 
had  in  mind  ;  and  if  he  had  it  in  mind  of 
Shakespeare,  who  gave  us,  with  his  histo 
ries  and  comedies  and  problems,  such  a 
searching  homily  as  "  Macbeth,"  one  feels 
that  he  scarcely  recognized  the  limita 
tions  of  the  dramatist's  art.  Few  con- 


sciences,  at  times,  seem  so  enlightened  as 
that  of  this  personally  unknown  person, 
so  withdrawn  into  his  work,  and  so  lost 
to  the  intensest  curiosity  of  after-time  ; 
at  other  times  he  seems  merely  Eliza 
bethan  in  his  coarseness,  his  courtliness, 
his  imperfect  sympathy. 


XX 

F  the  finer  kinds  of  romance, 
as  distinguished  from  the 
novel,  I  would  even  encour 
age  the  writing,  though  it  is 
one  of  the  hard  conditions 
of  romance  that  its  personages  starting 
with  a  parK  pris  can  rarely  be  characters 
with  a  living  growth,  but  are  apt  to  be 
types,  limited  to  the  expression  of  one 
principle,  simple,  elemental,  lacking  the 
God -given  complexity  of  motive  which 
we  find  in  all  the  human  beings  we  know. 
Hawthorne,  the  great  master  of  the  ro 
mance,  had  the  insight  and  the  power  to 
create  it  anew  as  a  kind  in  fiction  ;  though 
I  am  not  sure  that  The  Scarlet  Letter  and 
the  Blithedale  Romance  are  not,  strictly 
speaking,  novels  rather  than  romances. 
They  do  not  play  with  some  old  super 
stition  long  outgrown,  and  they  do  not 
invent  a  new  superstition  to  play  with, 


n6 


but  deal  with  things  vital  in  every  one's 
pulse.  I  am  not  saying  that  what  may 
be  called  the  fantastic  romance — the  ro 
mance  that  descends  from  Frankenstein 
rather  than  The  Scarlet  Letter — ought 
not  to  be.  On  the  contrary,  I  should 
grieve  to  lose  it,  as  I  should  grieve  to 
lose  the  pantomime  or  the  comic  opera- 
or  many  other  graceful  things  that  amuse 
the  passing  hour,  and  help  us  to  live 
agreeably  in  a  world  where  men  actually 
sin,  suffer,  and  die.  But  it  belongs  to 
the  decorative  arts,  and  though  it  has 
a  high  place  among  them,  it  cannot  be 
ranked  with  the  works  of  the  imagina 
tion — the  works  that  represent  and  body 
forth  human  experience.  Its  ingenuity 
can  always  afford  a  refined  pleasure,  and 
it  can  often,  at  some  risk  to  itself,  convey 
a  valuable  truth. 

Perhaps  the  whole  region  of  historical 
romance  might  be  reopened  with  advan 
tage  to  readers  and  writers  who  cannot 
bear  to  be  brought  face  to  face  with  hu 
man  nature,  but  require  the  haze  of 
distance  or  a  far  perspective,  in  which 
all  the  disagreeable  details  shall  be  lost. 


There  is  no  good  reason  why  these  harm 
less  people  should  not  be  amused,  or  their 
little  preferences  indulged. 

But  here,  again,  I  have  my  modest 
doubts,  some  recent  instances  are  so  fat 
uous,  as  far  as  the  portrayal  of  character 
goes,  though  I  find  them  admirably  con 
trived  in  some  respects.  When  I  have 
owned  the  excellence  of  the  staging  in 
every  respect,  and  the  conscience  with 
which  the  carpenter  (as  the  theatrical 
folks  say)  has  done  his  work,  I  am  at 
the  end  of  my  praises.  The  people  af 
fect  me  like  persons  of  our  generation 
made  up  for  the  parts  ;  well  trained,  well 
costumed,  but  actors,  and  almost  ama 
teurs.  They  have  the  quality  that  makes 
the  histrionics  of  amateurs  endurable ; 
they  are  ladies  and  gentlemen  ;  the  worst, 
the  wickedest  of  them,  is  a  lady  or  gen 
tleman  behind  the  scene. 

Yet,  no  doubt  it  is  well  that  there 
should  be  a  reversion  to  the  earlier  types 
of  thinking  and  feeling,  to  earlier  ways  of 
looking  at  human  nature,  and  I  will  not 
altogether  refuse  the  pleasure  offered  me 
by  the  poetic  romancer  or  the  historical 


romancer  because  I  find  my  pleasure 
chiefly  in  Tolstoi  and  James  and  Glados 
and  Valdes  and  Thomas  Hardy  and  Tour- 
gueneff,  and  Balzac  at  his  best. 

The  reversions  or  counter-currents  in 
the  general  tendency  of  a  time  are  very 
curious,  and  are  worthy  tolerant  study. 
They  are  always  to  be  found ;  perhaps 
they  form  the  exception  that  establishes 
the  rule ;  at  least  they  distinguish  it. 
They  give  us  performances  having  an  ar 
chaic  charm  by  which,  by-and-by,  things 
captivate  for  reasons  unconnected  with 
their  inherent  beauty.  They  become 
quaint,  and  this  is  reason  enough  for  lik 
ing  them,  for  returning  to  them,  and  in 
art  for  trying  to  do  them  again.  But  I 
confess  that  I  like  better  to  go  forward 
than  to  go  backward,  and  it  is  saying  very 
little  to  say  that  I  value  more  such  a  nov 
el  as  Mr.  James's  Tragic  Muse  than  all 
the  romantic  attempts  since  Hawthorne. 
I  call  Mr.  James  a  novelist  because  there 
is  yet  no  name  for  the  literary  kind 
he  has  invented,  and  so  none  for  the  in 
ventor.  The  fatuity  of  the  stoty  merely 
as  a  story  is  something  that  must  early 


impress  the  story-teller  who  does  not  live 
in  the  stone  age  of  fiction  and  criticism. 
To  spin  a  yarn  for  the  yarn's  sake,  that 
is  an  ideal  worthy  of  a  nineteenth -cen 
tury  Englishman,  doting  in  forgetfulness 
of  the  English  masters  and  grovelling  in 
ignorance  of  the  Continental  masters ; 
but.  wholly  impossible  to  an  American  of 
Mr.  Henry  James's  modernity.  To  him  it 
must  seem  like  the  lies  swapped  between 
men  after  the  ladies  have  left  the  table 
and  they  are  sinking  deeper  and  deeper 
into  their  cups  and  growing  dimmer  and 
dimmer  behind  their  cigars.  To  such  a 
mind  as  his  the  story  could  never  have 
value  except  as  a  means ;  it  could  not 
exist  for  him  as  an  end ;  it  could  be  used 
only  illustratively  ;  it  could  be  the  frame, 
not  possibly  the  picture.  But  in  the 
mean  time  the  kind  of  thing  he  wished 
to  do,  and  began  to  do,  and  has  always 
done,  amid  a  stupid  clamor,  which  still 
lasts,  that  it  was  not  a  story,  had  to  be 
called  a  novel ;  and  the  wretched  victim 
of  the  novel  habit  (only  a  little  less  intel 
lectually  degraded  than  the  still  more 
miserable  slave  of  the  theatre  habit),  who 


wished  neither  to  perceive  nor  to  reflect, 
but  only  to  be  acted  upon  by  plot  and  inci 
dent,  was  lost  in  an  endless  trouble  about 
it.  Here  was  a  thing  called  a  novel,  writ 
ten  with  extraordinary  charm ;  interest 
ing  by  the  vigor  and  vivacity  with  which 
phases  and  situations  and  persons  were 
handled  in  it ;  inviting  him  to  the  inti 
macy  of  characters  divined  with  creative 
insight ;  making  him  witness  of  motives 
and  emotions  and  experiences  of  the 
finest  import ;  and  then  suddenly  requir 
ing  him  to  be  man  enough  to  cope  with 
the  question  itself;  not  solving  it  for  him 
by  a  marriage  or  a  murder,  and  not  spoon- 
victualling  him  with  a  moral  minced 
small  and  then  thinned  with  milk  and 
water,  and  familiarly  flavored  with  sen 
timentality  or  religiosity.  I  can  imagine 
the  sort  of  shame  with  which  such  a 
writer  as  Mr.  James,  so  original  and  so 
clear-sighted,  may  sometimes  have  been 
tempted  by  the  outcry  of  the  nurslings 
of  fable,  to  give  them  of  the  diet  on 
which  they  had  been  pampered  to  imbe 
cility  ;  or  to  call  together  his  characters 
fora  sort  of  round-up  in  the  last  chapter. 


XXI 


is  no  doubt  such  work  as 
Mr.  James's  that  an  English 
essayist  (Mr.  E.  Hughes)  has 
chiefly  in  mind,  in  a  study  of 
the  differences  of  the  Eng 
lish  and  American  novel.  He  defines 
the  English  novel  as  working  from  with 
in  outwardly,  and  the  American  novel  as 
working  from  without  inwardly.  The 
definition  is  very  surprisingly  accurate ; 
and  the  critic's  discovery  of  this  fun 
damental  difference  is  carried  into  par 
ticulars  with  a  distinctness  which  is  as 
unfailing  as  the  courtesy  he  has  in  recog 
nizing  the  present  superiority  of  Ameri 
can  work.  He  seems  to  think,  however, 
that  the  English  principle  is  the  better, 
though  why  he  should  think  so  he  does 
not  make  so  clear.  It  appears  a  belated 
and  rather  voluntary  effect  of  patriotism, 
disappointing  in  a  philosopher  of  his  de- 


gree  ;  but  it  does  not  keep  him  from  very 
explicit  justice  to  the  best  characteristics 
of  our  fiction.  "  The  American  novelist 
is  distinguished  for  the  intellectual  grip 
which  he  has  of  his  characters.  .  .  .  He 
penetrates  below  the  crust,  and  he  recog 
nizes  no  necessity  of  the  crust  to  antici 
pate  what  is  beneath.  .  .  .  He  utterly 
discards  heroics ;  he  often  even  discards 
anything  like  a  plot.  .  .  .  His  story  proper 
is  often  no  more  than  a  natural  predica 
ment.  ...  It  is  no  stage  view  we  have 
of  his  characters,  but  one  behind  the 
scenes.  .  .  .  We  are  brought  into  contact 
with  no  strained  virtues,  illumined  by 
strained  lights  upon  strained  heights  of 
situation.  .  .  .  Whenever  he  appeals  to 
the  emotions  it  would  seem  to  be  with  an 
appeal  to  the  intellect  too.  .  .  .  because 
he  weaves  his  story  of  the  finer,  less  self- 
evident  though  common  threads  of  hu 
man  nature,  seldom  calling  into  play  the 
grosser  and  more  powerful  strain.  .  .  . 
Everywhere  in  his  pages  we  come  across 
acquaintances  undisguised.  .  .  .  The  char 
acters  in  an  American  novel  are  never 
unapproachable  to  the  reader.  .  .  .  The 


123 


naturalness,  with  the  every-day  atmos 
phere  which  surrounds  it,  is  one  great 
charm  of  the  American  novel.  ...  It  is 
throughout  examinative,  discursory,  even 
more — quizzical.  Its  characters  are  un 
dergoing,  at  the  hands  of  the  author, 
calm,  interested  observation.  .  .  .  He  is 
never  caught  identifying  himself  with 
them ;  he  must  preserve  impartiality  at 
all  costs  .  .  .  but  .  .  .  the  touch  of  nature 
is  always  felt,  the  feeling  of  kinship 
always  follows.  .  .  .  The  strength  of  the 
American  novel  is  its  optimistic  faith. 
...  If  out  of  this  persistent  hopefulness  it 
can  evolve  for  men  a  new  order  of  trust 
fulness,  a  tenet  that  between  man  and 
man  there  should  be  less  suspicion,  more 
confidence,  since  human  nature  sanctions 
it,  its  mission  will  have  been  more  than 
an  aesthetic,  it  will  have  been  a  moral 
one." 

Not  all  of  this  will  be  found  true  of 
Mr.  James,  but  all  that  relates  to  artistic 
methods  and  characteristics  will,  and  the 
rest  is  true  of  American  novels  generally. 
For  the  most  part  in  their  range  and  ten 
dency  they  are  admirable.  I  will  not  say 


they  are  all  good,  or  that  any  of  them  is 
wholly  good ;  but  I  find  in  nearly  every 
one  of  them  a  disposition  to  regard  our 
life  without  the  literary  glasses  so  long 
thought  desirable,  and  to  see  character, 
not  as  it  is  in  other  fiction,  but  as  it 
abounds  outside  of  all  fiction.  This 
disposition  sometimes  goes  with  poor 
enough  performance,  but  in  some  of  our 
novels  it  goes  with  performance  that  is 
excellent ;  and  at  any  rate  it  is  for  the 
present  more  valuable  than  evenness  of 
performance.  It  is  what  relates  Ameri 
can  fiction  to  the  only  living  movement 
in  imaginative  literature,  and  distinguish 
es  by  a  superior  freshness  and  authen 
ticity  any  group  of  American  novels  from 
a  similarly  accidental  group  of  English 
novels,  giving  them  the  same  good  right 
to  be  as  the  like  number  of  recent  Rus 
sian  novels,  French  novels,  Spanish  nov 
els,  Italian  novels,  Norwegian  novels. 

It  is  the  difference  of  the  American 
novelist's  ideals  from  those  of  the  Eng 
lish  novelist  that  gives  him  his  advan 
tage,  and  seems  to  promise  him  the  future. 
The  love  of  the  passionate  and  the  he- 


roic,  as  the  Englishman  has  it,  is  such  a 
crude  and  unwholesome  thing,  so  deaf 
and  blind  to  all  the  most  delicate  and 
important  facts  of  art  and  life,  so  insensi 
ble  to  the  subtle  values  in  either  that  its 
presence  or  absence  makes  the  whole  dif 
ference,  and  enables  one  who  is  not  ob 
sessed  by  it  to  thank  Heaven  that  he  is 
not  as  that  other  man  is. 

There  can  be  little  question  that  many 
refinements  of  thought  and  spirit  which 
every  American  is  sensible  of  in  the  fiction 
of  this  continent,  are  necessarily  lost  upon 
our  good  kin  beyond  seas,  whose  thumb- 
fingered  apprehension  requires  something 
gross  and  palpable  for  its  assurance  of 
reality.  This  is  not  their  fault,  and  I  am 
not  sure  that  it  is  wholly  their  misfort 
une  :  they  are  made  so  as  not  to  miss 
what  they  do  not  find,  and  they  are  sim 
ply  content  without  those  subtleties  of 
life  and  character  which  it  gives  us  so 
keen  a  pleasure  to  have  noted  in  litera 
ture.  If  they  perceive  them  at  all  it  is 
as  something  vague  and  diaphanous, 
something  that  filmily  wavers  before 
their  sense  and  teases  them,  much  as  the 


126 


beings  of  an  invisible  world  might  mock 
one  of  our  material  frame  by  intimations 
of  their  presence.  It  is  with  reason, 
therefore,  on  the  part  of  an  Englishman, 
that  Mr.  Henley  complains  of  our  fiction 
as  a  shadow-land,  though  we  find  more 
and  more  in  it  the  faithful  report  of  our 
life,  its  motives  and  emotions,  and  all  the 
comparatively  etherealized  passions  and 
ideals  that  influence  it. 

In  fact,  the  American  who  chooses  to 
enjoy  his  birthright  to  the  full,  lives  in  a 
world  wholly  different  from  the  English 
man's,  and  speaks  (too  often  through  his 
nose)  another  language :  he  breathes  a 
rarefied  and  nimble  air  full  of  shining 
possibilities  and  radiant  promises  which 
the  fog-and-soot-clogged  lungs  of  those 
less-favored  islanders  struggle  in  vain  to 
fill  themselves  with.  But  he  ought  to  be 
modest  in  his  advantage,  and  patient  with 
the  coughing  and  sputtering  of  his  cousin 
who  complains  of  finding  himself  in  an 
exhausted  receiver  on  plunging  into  one 
of  our  novels.  To  be  quite  just  to  the 
poor  fellow,  I  have  had  some  such  expe 
rience  as  that  myself  in  the  atmosphere 


of  some  of  our  more  attenuated  ro 
mances. 

Yet  every  now  and  then  I  read  a  book 
with  perfect  comfort  and  much  exhilara 
tion,  whose  scenes  the  average  English 
man  would  gasp  in.  Nothing  happens ; 
that  is,  nobody  murders  or  debauches 
anybody  else ;  there  is  no  arson  or  pillage 
of  any  sort ;  there  is  not  a  ghost,  or  a 
ravening  beast,  or  a  hair-breadth  escape, 
or  a  shipwreck,  or  a  monster  of  self-sacri 
fice,  or  a  lady  five  thousand  years  old  in 
the  whole  course  of  the  story  ;  "  no  prom 
enade,  no  band  of  music,  nossing  !"  as  Mr. 
Du  Maurier's  Frenchman  said  of  the 
meet  for  a  fox-hunt.  Yet  it  is  all  alive 
with  the  keenest  interest  for  those  who 
enjoy  the  study  of  individual  traits  and 
general  conditions  as  they  make  them 
selves  known  to  American  experience. 

These  conditions  have  been  so  favorable 
hitherto  (though  they  are  becoming  al 
ways  less  so)  that  they  easily  account  for 
the  optimistic  faith  of  our  novel  which 
Mr.  Hughes  notices.  It  used  to  be  one 
of  the  disadvantages  of  the  practice  of 
romance  in  America,  which  Hawthorne 


128 


more  or  less  whimsically  lamented,  that 
there  were  so  few  shadows  and  inequali 
ties  in  our  broad  level  of  prosperity  ;  and 
it  is  one  of  the  reflections  suggested  by 
Dostoievsky's  novel,  The  Crime  and  the 
Punishment,  that  whoever  struck  a  note 
so  profoundly  tragic  in  American  fiction 
would  do  a  false  and  mistaken  thing — as 
false  and  as  mistaken  in  its  way  as  deal 
ing  in  American  fiction  with  certain  nu 
dities  which  the  Latin  peoples  seem  to 
find  edifying.  Whatever  their  deserts, 
very  few  American  novelists  have  been 
led  out  to  be  shot,  or  finally  exiled  to  the 
rigors  of  a  winter  at  Duluth ;  and  in  a 
land  where  journeymen  carpenters  and 
plumbers  strike  for  four  dollars  a  day  the 
sum  of  hunger  and  cold  is  comparatively 
small,  and  the  wrong  from  class  to  class 
has  been  almost  inappreciable,  though  all 
this  is  changing  for  the  worse.  Our  nov 
elists,  therefore,  concern  themselves  with 
the  more  smiling  aspects  of  life,  which 
are  the  more  American,  and  seek  the 
universal  in  the  individual  rather  than 
the  social  interests.  It  is  worth  while, 
even  at  the  risk  of  being  called  common- 


place,  to  be  true  to  our  well-to-do  act 
ualities;  the  very  passions  themselves 
seem  to  be  softened  and  modified  by 
conditions  which  formerly  at  least  could 
not  be  said  to  wrong  any  one,  to  cramp 
endeavor,  or  to  cross  lawful  desire.  Sin 
and  suffering  and  shame  there  must  al 
ways  be  in  the  world,  I  suppose,  but  I  be 
lieve  that  in  this  new  world  of  ours  it  is 
still  mainly  from  one  to  another  one,  and 
oftener  still  from  one  to  one's  self.  We 
have  death  too  in  America,  and  a  great 
deal  of  disagreeable  and  painful  disease, 
which  the  multiplicity  of  our  patent  medi 
cines  does  not  seem  to  cure ;  but  this  is 
tragedy  that  comes  in  the  very  nature  of 
things,  and  is  not  peculiarly  American,  as 
the  large,  cheerful  average  of  health  and 
success  and  happy  life  is.  It  will  not  do 
to  boast,  but  it  is  well  to  be  true  to  the 
facts,  and  to  see  that,  apart  from  these 
purely  mortal  troubles,  the  race  here  has 
enjoyed  conditions  in  which  most  of  the 
ills  that  have  darkened  its  annals  might 
be  averted  by  honest  work  and  unselfish 
behavior. 

Fine   artists  we  have  among  us,  and 

o 


right-minded  as  far  as  they  go ;  and  we 
must  not  forget  this  at  evil  moments 
when  it  seems  as  if  all  the  women  had 
taken  to  writing  hysterical  improprieties, 
and  some  of  the  men  were  trying  to  be  at 
least  as  hysterical  in  despair  of  being  as 
improper.  If  we  kept  to  the  complexion 
of  a  certain  school — which  sadly  needs  a 
school  -  master — we  might  very  well  be 
despondent ;  but,  after  all,  that  school  is 
not  representative  of  our  conditions  or 
our  intentions.  Other  traits  are  much 
more  characteristic  of  our  life  and  our 
fiction.  In  most  American  novels,  vivid 
and  graphic  as  the  best  of  them  are,  the 
people  are  segregated  if  not  sequestered, 
and  the  scene  is  sparsely  populated.  The 
effect  may  be  in  instinctive  response  to 
the  vacancy  of  our  social  life,  and  I  shall 
not  make  haste  to  blame  it.  There  are 
few  places,  few  occasions  among  us,  in 
Avhich  a  novelist  can  get  a  large  number 
of  polite  people  together,  or  at  least  keep 
them  together.  Unless  he  carries  a  snap- 
camera  his  picture  of  them  has  no  prob 
ability  ;  they  affect  one  like  the  figures 
perfunctorily  associated  in  such  deadly 


old  engravings  as  that  of  "  Washington 
Irving  and  his  Friends."  Perhaps  it  is 
for  this  reason  that  we  excel  in  small 
pieces  with  three  or  four  figures,  or  in 
studies  of  rustic  communities,  where  there 
is  propinquity  if  not  society.  Our  grasp 
of  more  urbane  life  is  feeble  ;  most  at 
tempts  to  assemble  it  in  our  pictures  are 
failures,  possibly  because  it  is  too  transi 
tory,  too  intangible  in  its  nature  with  us, 
to  be  truthfully  represented  as  really  ex 
istent. 

I  am  not  sure  that  the  Americans  have 
not  brought  the  short  story  nearer  per 
fection  in  the  all-round  sense  than  almost 
any  other  people,  and  for  reasons  very 
simple  and  near  at  hand.  It  might  be 
argued  from  the  national  hurry  and  im 
patience  that  it  was  a  literary  form  pecul 
iarly  adapted  to  the  American  tempera 
ment,  but  I  suspect  that  its  extraordinary 
development  among  us  is  owing  much 
more  to  more  tangible  facts.  The  success 
of  American  magazines,  which  is  nothing 
less  than  prodigious,  is  only  commensu 
rate  with  their  excellence.  Their  sort  of 
success  is  not  only  from  the  courage  to 


decide  what  ought  to  please,  but  from  the 
knowledge  of  what  does  please  ;  and  it  is 
probable  that,  aside  from  the  pictures, 
it  is  the  short  stories  which  please  the 
readers  of  our  best  magazines.  The  se 
rial  novels  they  must  have,  of  course  ;  but 
rather  more  of  course  they  must  have 
short  stories,  and  by  operation  of  the  law 
of  supply  and  demand,  the  short  stories, 
abundant  in  quantity  and  excellent  in 
quality,  are  forthcoming  because  they  are 
wanted.  By  another  operation  of  the 
same  law,  which  political  economists  have 
more  recently  taken  account  of,  the  de 
mand  follows  the  supply,  and  short  sto 
ries  are  sought  for  because  there  is  a 
proven  ability  to  furnish  them,  and  peo 
ple  read  them  willingly  because  they  are 
usually  very  good.  The  art  of  writing 
them  is  now  so  disciplined  and  diffused 
with  us  that  there  is  no  lack  either  for 
the  magazines  or  for  the  newspaper  "syn 
dicates  "  which  deal  in  them  almost  to 
the  exclusion  of  the  serials.  In  other 
countries  the  feuilleton  of  the  journals  is 
a  novel  continued  from  day  to  day,  but 
with  us  the  papers,  whether  daily  or 


'33 


weekly,  now  more  rarely  print  novels, 
whether  they  get  them  at  first  hand  from 
the  writers,  as  a  great  many  do,  or 
through  the  syndicates,  which  purvey  a 
vast  variety  of  literary  wares,  chiefly  for 
the  Sunday  editions  of  the  city  journals. 
In  the  country  papers  the  short  story 
takes  the  place  of  the  chapters  of  a  serial 
which  used  to  be  given. 


XXII 

N  interesting  fact  in  regard 
to  the  different  varieties  of 
the  short  story  among  us  is 
that  the  sketches  and  stud 
ies  by  the  women  seem  faith- 
fuler  and  more  realistic  than  those  of 
the  men,  in  proportion  to  their  number. 
Their  tendency  is  more  distinctly  in  that 
direction,  and  there  is  a  solidity,  an  honest 
observation,  in  the  work  of  such  women 
as  Mrs.  Cooke,  Miss  Murfree,  Miss  Wilkins 
and  Miss  Jewett,  which  often  leaves  little 
to  be  desired.  I  should,  upon  the  whole, 
be  disposed  to  rank  American  short 
stories  only  below  those  of  such  Russian 
writers  as  I  have  read,  and  I  should  praise 
rather  than  blame  their  free  use  of  our 
different  local  parlances,  or  "  dialects,"  as 
people  call  them.  I  like  this  because  I 
hope  that  our  inherited  English  may  be 
constantly  freshened  and  revived  from  the 


135 


native  sources  which  our  literary  decen 
tralization  will  help  to  keep  open,  and  I 
will  own  that  as  I  turn  over  novels  com 
ing  from  Philadelphia,  from  New  Mexico, 
from  Boston,  from  Tennessee,  from  rural 
New  England,  from  New  York,  every 
local  flavor  of  diction  gives  me  courage 
and  pleasure.  M.  Alphonse  Daudet,  in  a 
conversation  which  Mr.  H.  H.  Boyesen 
has  set  down  in  a  recently  recorded  in 
terview  with  him,  said,  in  speaking  of 
Tourgueneff  :  "  What  a  luxury  it  must  be 
to  have  a  great  big  untrodden  barbaric 
language  to  wade  into  !  We  poor  fellows 
who  work  in  the  language  of  an  old  civil 
ization,  we  may  sit  and  chisel  our  little 
verbal  felicities,  only  to  find  in  the  end 
that  it  is  a  borrowed  jewel  we  are  polish 
ing.  The  crown  jewels  of  our  French 
tongue  have  passed  through  the  hands 
of  so  many  generations  of  monarchs  that 
it  seems  like  presumption  on  the  part  of 
any  late-born  pretender  to  attempt  to 
wear  them." 

This  grief  is,  of  course,  a  little  whimsi 
cal,  yet  it  has  a  certain  measure  of  reason 
in  it,  and  the  same  regret  has  been  more 


136 


seriously  expressed  by  the  Italian  poet 
Aleardi : 

"  Muse  of  an  aged  people,  in  the  eve 
Of  fading  civilization,  1  was  born. 

Oh,  fortunate, 

My  sisters,  who  in  the  heroic  dawn 
Of  races  sung !     To  them  did  destiny  give 
The  virgin  fire  and  chaste  ingenuousness 
Of    their   land's    speech ;    and,    reverenced, 

their  hands 
Ran  over  potent  strings." 

It  will  never  do  to  allow  that  we  are  at 
such  a  desperate  pass  in  English,  but 
something  of  this  divine  despair  we  may 
feel  too  in  thinking  of  "  the  spacious  times 
of  great  Elizabeth,"  when  the  poets  were 
trying  the  stops  of  the  young  language, 
and  thrilling  with  the  surprises  of  their 
own  music.  We  may  comfort  ourselves, 
however,  unless  we  prefer  a  luxury  of 
grief  by  remembering  that  no  language, 
is  ever  old  on  the  lips  of  those  who  speak 
it,  no  matter  how  decrepit  it  drops  from 
the  pen.  We  have  only  to  leave  our 
studies,  editorial  and  other,  and  go  into 
the  shops  and  fields  to  find  the  "  spacious 


'37 


times  "  again ;  and  from  the  beginning 
Realism,  before  she  had  put  on  her  capital 
letter,  had  divined  this  near-at-hand  truth 
along  with  the  rest.  Mr.  Lowell,  almost 
the  greatest  and  finest  realist  who  ever 
wrought  in  verse,  showed  us  that  Eliza 
beth  was  still  Queen  where  he  heard 
Yankee  farmers  talk.  One  need  not  invite 
slang  into  the  company  of  its  betters, 
though  perhaps  slang  has  been  dropping 
its  "  s  "  and  becoming  language  ever  since 
the  world  began,  and  is  certainly  some 
times  delightful  and  forcible  beyond  the 
reach  of  the  dictionary.  I  would  not  have 
any  one  go  about  for  new  words,  but  if 
one  of  them  came  aptly,  not  to  reject  its 
help.  For  our  novelists  to  try  to  write 
Americanly,  from  any  motive,  would  be  a 
dismal  error,  but  being  born  Americans,  I 
would  have  the  muse  "  Americanisms  " 
whenever  these  serve  their  turn ;  and 
when  their  characters  speak,  I  should  like 
to  hear  them  speak  true  American,  with 
all  the  varying  Tennesseean,  Philadel- 
phian,  Bostonian.and  New  York  accents. 
If  we  bother  ourselves  to  write  what 
the  critics  imagine  to  be  "  English,"  we 


138 


shall  be  priggish  and  artificial,  and  still 
more  so  if  we  make  our  Americans  talk 
"  English."  There  is  also  this  serious  dis 
advantage  about  "  English,"  that  if  we 
wrote  the  best  "  English  "  in  the  world, 
probably  the  English  themselves  would 
not  know  it,  or,  if  they  did,  certainly  would 
not  own  it.  It  has  always  been  supposed 
by  grammarians  and  purists  that  a  lan 
guage  can  be  kept  as  they  find  it;  but  lan 
guages,  while  they  live,  are  perpetually 
changing.  God  apparently  meant  them 
for  the  common  people — whom  Lincoln 
believed  God  liked  because  he  had  made 
so  many  of  them  ;  and  the  common  peo 
ple  will  use  them  freely  as  they  use  other 
gifts  of  God.  On  their  lips  our  continental 
English  will  differ  more  and  more  from 
the  insular  English,  and  I  believe  that  this 
is  not  deplorable,  but  desirable. 

In  fine,  I  would  have  our  American 
novelists  be  as  American  as  they  un 
consciously  can.  Matthew  Arnold  com 
plained  that  he  found  no  "  distinction  " 
in  our  life,  and  I  would  gladly  persuade 
all  artists  intending  greatness  in  any  kind 
among  us  that  the  recognition  of  the  fact 


'39 


pointed  out  by  Mr.  Arnold  ought  to  be  a 
source  of  inspiration  to  them,  and  not 
discouragement.  We  have  been  now 
some  hundred  years  building  up  a  state 
on  the  affirmation  of  the  essential  equali 
ty  of  men  in  their  rights  and  duties,  and 
whether  we  have  been  right  or  been  wrong 
the  gods  have  taken  us  at  our  word,  and 
have  responded  to  us  with  a  civilization 
in  which  there  is  no  "distinction  "  per 
ceptible  to  the  eye  that  loves  and  values 
it.  Such  beauty  and  such  grandeur  as  we 
have  is  common  beauty,  common  gran 
deur,  or  the  beauty  and  grandeur  in  which 
the  quality  of  solidarity  so  prevails  that 
neither  distinguishes  itself  to  the  disad 
vantage  of  anything  else.  It  seems  to 
me  that  these  conditions  invite  the  artist 
to  the  study  and  the  appreciation  of  the 
common,  and  to  the  portrayal  in  every 
art  of  those  finer  and  higher  aspects 
which  unite  rather  than  sever  humanity, 
if  he  would  thrive  in  our  new  order  of 
things.  The  talent  that  is  robust  enough 
to  front  the  every-day  world  and  catch 
the  charm  of  its  work-worn,  care-worn, 
brave,  kindly  face,  need  not  fear  the  en- 


counter,  though  it  seems  terrible  to  the 
sort  nurtured  in  the  superstition  of  the 
romantic,  the  bizarre,  the  heroic,  the  dis 
tinguished,  as  the  things  alone  worthy  of 
painting  or  carving  or  writing.  The  arts 
must  become  democratic,  and  then  we 
shall  have  the  expression  of  America  in 
art ;  and  the  reproach  which  Mr.  Arnold 
was  half  right  in  making  us  shall  have  no 
justice  in  it  any  longer;  we  shall  be  "dis 
tinguished." 


XXIII 

N  the  mean  time  it  has  been 
said  with  a  superficial  jus 
tice  that  our  fiction  is  nar 
row  ;  though  in  the  same 
sense  I  suppose  the  pres 
ent  English  fiction  is  as  narrow  as  our 
own  ;  and  most  modern  fiction  is  nar 
row  in  a  certain  sense.  In  Italy  the  best 
men  are  writing  novels  as  brief  and  re 
stricted  in  range  as  ours  ;  in  Spain  the 
novels  are  intense  and  deep,  and  not  spa 
cious  ;  the  French  school,  with  the  ex 
ception  of  Zola,  is  narrow ;  the  Norwe 
gians  are  narrow ;  the  Russians,  except 
Tolstoi,  are  narrow,  and  the  next  greatest 
after  him,  Tourgueneff,  is  the  narrowest 
great  novelist,  as  to  mere  dimensions, 
that  ever  lived,  dealing  nearly  always 
with  small  groups,  isolated  and  analyzed 
in  the  most  American  fashion.  In  fact, 
the  charge  of  narrowness  accuses  the 


whole  tendency  of  modern  fiction  as 
much  as  the  American  school.  But  I 
do  not  by  any  means  allow  that  this  nar 
rowness  is  a  defect,  while  denying  that  it 
is  a  universal  characteristic  of  our  fic 
tion  ;  it  is  rather,  for  the  present,  a  virt 
ue.  Indeed,  I  should  call  the  present 
American  work,  North  and  South,  thor 
ough  rather  than  narrow.  In  one  sense 
it  is  as  broad  as  life,  for  each  man  is  a 
microcosm,  and  the  writer  who  is  able  to 
acquaint  us  intimately  with  half  a  dozen 
people,  or  the  conditions  of  a  neighbor 
hood  or  a  class,  has  done  something 
which  cannot  in  any  bad  sense  be  called 
narrow  ;  his  breadth  is  vertical  instead  of 
lateral,  that  is  all ;  and  this  depth  is  more 
desirable  than  horizontal  expansion  in 
a  civilization  like  ours,  where  the  differ 
ences  are  not  of  classes,  but  of  types,  and 
not  of  types  either  so  much  as  of  charac 
ters.  A  new  method  was  necessary  in 
dealing  with  the  new  conditions,  and  the 
new  method  is  world-wide,  because  the 
whoie  world  is  more  or  less  American 
ized.  Tolstoi  is  exceptionally  volumi 
nous  among  modern  writers,  even  Rus- 


sian  writers ;  and  it  might  be  said  that 
the  forte  of  Tolstoi  himself  is  not  in  his 
breadth  sidewise,  but  in  his  breadth  up 
ward  and  downward.  The  Death  of 
Ivan  Illitch  leaves  as  vast  an  impres 
sion  on  the  reader's  soul  as  any  episode 
of  War  and  Peace,  which,  indeed,  can 
be  recalled  only  in  episodes,  and  not  as  a 
whole.  I  think  that  our  writers  may  be 
safely  counselled  to  continue  their  work 
in  the  modern  way,  because  it  is  the  best 
way  yet  known.  If  they  make  it  true,  it 
will  be  large,  no  matter  what  its  super 
ficies  are  ;  and  it  would  be  the  greatest 
mistake  to  try  to  make  it  big.  A  big 
book  is  necessarily  a  group  of  episodes 
more  or  less  loosely  connected  by  a  thread 
of  narrative,  and  there  seems  no  reason 
why  this  thread  must  always  be  supplied. 
Each  episode  may  be  quite  distinct,  or  it 
may  be  one  of  a  connected  group ;  the 
final  effect  will  be  from  the  truth  of  each 
episode,  not  from  the  size  of  the  group. 

The  whole  field  of  human  experience 
was  never  so  nearly  covered  by  imagina 
tive  literature  in  any  age  as  in  this  ;  and 
American  life  especially  is  getting  repre- 


sented  with  unexampled  fulness.  It  is 
true  that  no  one  writer,  no  one  book, 
represents  it,  for  that  is  not  possible  ;  our 
social  and  political  decentralization  for 
bids  this,  and  may  forever  forbid  it.  But  a 
great  number  of  very  good  writers  are  in 
stinctively  striving  to  make  each  part  of 
the  country  and  each  phase  of  our  civili 
zation  known  to  all  the  other  parts ;  and 
their  work  is  not  narrow  in  any  feeble  or 
vicious  sense.  The  world  was  once  very 
little,  and  it  is  now  very  large.  For 
merly,  all  science  could  be  grasped  by 
a  single  mind ;  but  now  the  man  who 
hopes  to  become  great  or  useful  in  sci 
ence  must  devote  himself  to  a  single  de 
partment.  It  is  so  in  everything — all  arts, 
all  trades;  and  the  novelist  is  not  superior 
to  the  universal  rule  against  universality. 
He  contributes  his  share  to  a  thorough 
knowledge  of  groups  of  the  human  race 
under  conditions  which  are  full  of  inspir 
ing  novelty  and  interest.  He  works  more 
fearlessly,  frankly,  and  faithfully  than  the 
novelist  ever  worked  before  ;  his  work,  or 
much  of  it,  may  be  destined  never  to  be 
reprinted  from  the  monthly  magazines ; 


but  if  he  turns  to  his  book-shelf  and  re 
gards  the  array  of  the  British  or  other 
classics,  he  knows  that  they  too  are  for 
the  most  part  dead ;  he  knows  that  the 
planet  itself  is  destined  to  freeze  up  and 
drop  into  the  sun  at  last,  with  all  its  sur 
viving  literature  upon  it.  The  question 
is  merely  one  of  time.  He  consoles  him 
self,  therefore,  if  he  is  wise,  and  works 
on ;  and  we  may  all  take  some  comfort 
from  the  thought  that  most  things  can 
not  be  helped.  Especially  a  movement 
in  literature  like  that  which  the  world  is 
now  witnessing  cannot  be  helped ;  and 
we  could  no  more  turn  back  and  be  of 
the  literary  fashions  of  any  age  before 
this  than  we  could  turn  back  and  be  of  its 
social,  economical,  or  political  conditions. 
If  I  were  authorized  to  address  any 
word  directly  to  our  novelists  I  should  say, 
Do  not  trouble  yourselves  about  stand 
ards  or  ideals ;  but  try  to  be  faithful  and 
natural :  remember  that  there  is  no  great 
ness,  no  beauty,  which  does  not  come  from 
truth  to  your  own  knowledge  of  things ; 
and  keep  on  working,  even  if  your  work 
is  not  long  remembered. 


At  least  three-fifths  of  the  literature 
called  classic,  in  all  languages,  no  more 
lives  than  the  poems  and  stories  that  per 
ish  monthly  in  our  magazines.  It  is  all 
printed  and  reprinted,  generation  after 
generation,  century  after  century  ;  but  it 
is  not  alive ;  it  is  as  dead  as  the  people 
who  wrote  it  and  read  it,  and  to  whom  it 
meant  something,  perhaps  ;  with  whom 
it  was  a  fashion,  a  caprice,  a  passing  taste. 
A  superstitious  piety  preserves  it,  and 
pretends  that  it  has  aesthetic  qualities 
which  can  delight  or  edify ;  but  nobody 
really  enjoys  it,  except  as  a  reflection  of 
the  past  moods  and  humors  of  the  race, 
or  a  revelation  of  the  author's  character ; 
otherwise  it  is  trash,  and  often  very  filthy 
trash,  which  the  present  trash  generally 
is  not. 


XXIV 

|NE  of  the  great  newspapers 
the  other  day  invited  the 
prominent  American  au 
thors  to  speak  their  minds 
upon  a  point  in  the  theory 
and  practice  of  fiction  which  had  already 
vexed  some  of  them.  It  was  the  question 
of  how  much  or  how  little  the  American 
novel  ought  to  deal  with  certain  facts  of 
life  which  are  not  usually  talked  of  be 
fore  young  people,  and  especially  young 
ladies.  Of  course  the  question  was  not 
decided,  and  I  forget  just  how  far  the 
balance  inclined  in  favor  of  a  larger  free 
dom  in  the  matter.  But  it  certainly  in 
clined  that  way ;  one  or  two  writers  of 
the  sex  which  is  somehow  supposed  to 
have  purity  in  its  keeping  (as  if  purity 
were  a  thing  that  did  not  practically 
concern  the  other  sex,  preoccupied  with 
serious  affairs)  gave  it  a  rather  vigorous 


tilt  to  that  side.  In  view  of  this  fact  it 
would  not  be  the  part  of  prudence  to 
make  an  effort  to  dress  the  balance  ;  and 
indeed  I  do  not  know  that  I  was  going 
to  make  any  such  effort.  But  there  are 
some  things  to  say,  around  and  about  the 
subject,  which  I  should  like  to  have  some 
one  else  say,  and  which  I  may  myself 
possibly  be  safe  in  suggesting. 

One  of  the  first  of  these  is  the  fact, 
generally  lost  sight  of  by  those  who  cen 
sure  the  Anglo-Saxon  novel  for  its  prud- 
ishness,  that  it  is  really  not  such  a  prude 
after  all ;  and  that  if  it  is  sometimes  ap 
parently  anxious  to  avoid  those  experi 
ences  of  life  not  spoken  of  before  young 
people,  this  may  be  an  appearance  only. 
Sometimes  a  novel  which  has  this  shuf 
fling  air,  this  effect  of  truckling  to  pro 
priety,  might  defend  itself,  if  it  could 
speak  for  itself,  by  saying  that  such  ex 
periences  happened  not  to  come  within 
its  scheme,  and  that,  so  far  from  maim 
ing  or  mutilating  itself  in  ignoring  them, 
it  was  all  the  more  faithfully  representa 
tive  of  the  tone  of  modern  life  in  dealing 
with  love  that  was  chaste,  and  with  pas- 


sion  so  honest  that  it  could  be  openly 
spoken  of  before  the  tenderest  society 
bud  at  dinner.  It  might  say  that  the 
guilty  intrigue,  the  betrayal,  the  extreme 
flirtation  even,  was  the  exceptional  thing 
in  life,  and  unless  the  scheme  of  the 
story  necessarily  involved  it,  that  it  would 
be  bad  art  to  lug  it  in,  and  as  bad  taste  as 
to  introduce  such  topics  in  a  mixed  com 
pany.  It  could  say  very  justly  that  the 
novel  in  our  civilization  now  always  ad 
dresses  a  mixed  company,  and  that  the 
vast  majority  of  the  company  are  ladies, 
and  that  very  many,  if  not  most,  of  these 
ladies  are  young  girls.  If  the  novel  were 
written  for  men  and  for  married  women 
alone,  as  in  continental  Europe,  it  might 
be  altogether  different.  But  the  simple 
fact  is  that  it  is  not  written  for  them 
alone  among  us,  and  it  is  a  question  of 
writing,  under  cover  of  our  universal  ac 
ceptance,  things  for  young  girls  to  read 
which  you  would  be  put  out-of-doors  for 
saying  to  them,  or  of  frankly  giving  no 
tice  of  your  intention,  and  so  cutting 
yourself  off  from  the  pleasure — and  it  is 
a  very  high  and  sweet  one — of  appealing 


to  these  vivid,  responsive  intelligences, 
which  are  none  the  less  brilliant  and  ad 
mirable  because  they  are  innocent. 

One  day  a  novelist  who  liked,  after  the 
manner  of  other  men,  to  repine  at  his 
hard  fate,  complained  to  his  friend,  a 
critic,  that  he  was  tired  of  the  restriction 
he  had  put  upon  himself  in  this  regard ; 
for  it  is  a  mistake,  as  can  be  readily 
shown,  to  suppose  that  others  impose  it. 
"  See  how  free  those  French  fellows  are  !" 
he  rebelled.  "  Shall  we  always  be  shut 
up  to  our  tradition  of  decency  ?" 

"  Do  you  think  it's  much  worse  than 
being  shut  up  to  their  tradition  of  inde 
cency?"  said  his  friend. 

Then  that  novelist  began  to  reflect,  and 
he  remembered  how  sick  the  invariable 
motive  of  the  French  novel  made  him. 
He  perceived  finally  that,  convention  for 
convention,  ours  was  not  only  more  tol 
erable,  but  on  the  whole  was  truer  to  life, 
not  only  to  its  complexion,  but  also  to  its 
texture.  No  one  will  pretend  that  there 
is  not  vicious  love  beneath  the  surface  of 
our  society  ;  if  he  did,  the  fetid  explosions 
of  the  divorce  trials  would  refute  him ; 


but  if  he  pretended  that  it  was  in  any  just 
sense  characteristic  of  our  society,  he 
could  be  still  more  easily  refuted.  Yet  it 
exists,  and  it  is  unquestionably  the  mate 
rial  of  tragedy,  the  stuff  from  which  in 
tense  effects  are  wrought.  The  question, 
after  owning  this  fact,  is  whether  these 
intense  effects  are  not  rather  cheap  ef 
fects.  I  incline  to  think  they  are,  and  I 
will  try  to  say  why  I  think  so,  if  I  may  do 
so  without  otfence.  The  material  itself, 
the  mere  mention  of  it,  has  an  instant 
fascination ;  it  arrests,  it  detains,  till  the 
last  word  is  said,  and  while  there  is  any 
thing  to  be  hinted.  This  is  what  makes 
a  love  intrigue  of  some  sort  all  but  es 
sential  to  the  popularity  of  any  fiction. 
Without  such  an  intrigue  the  intellectual 
equipment  of  the  author  must  be  of  the 
highest,  and  then  he  will  succeed  only 
with  the  highest  class  of  readers.  But 
any  author  who  will  deal  with  a  guilty 
love  intrigue  holds  all  readers  in  his  hand, 
the  highest  with  the  lowest,  as  long  as  he 
hints  the  slightest  hope  of  the  smallest 
potential  naughtiness.  He  need  not  at 
all  be  a  great  author ;  he  may  be  a  very 


152 


shabby  wretch,  if  he  has  but  the  courage 
or  the  trick  of  that  sort  of  thing.  The 
critics  will  call  him  "  virile  "  and  "  pas 
sionate  ;"  decent  people  will  be  ashamed 
to  have  been  limed  by  him  ;  but  the  low 
average  will  only  ask  another  chance  of 
flocking  into  his  net.  If  he  happens  to 
be  an  able  writer,  his  really  fine  and  costly 
work  will  be  unheeded,  and  the  lure  to 
the  appetite  will  be  chiefly  remembered. 
There  may  be  other  qualities  which  make 
reputations  for  other  men,  but  in  his  case 
they  will  count  for  nothing.  He  pays 
this  penalty  for  his  success  in  that  kind  ; 
and  every  one  pays  some  such  penalty 
who  deals  with  some  such  material.  It 
attaches  in  like  manner  to  the  triumphs 
of  the  writers  who  now  almost  form  a 
school  among  us,  and  who  may  be  said  to 
have  established  themselves  in  an  easy 
popularity  simply  by  the  study  of  erotic 
shivers  and  fervors.  They  may  find  their 
account  in  the  popularity,  or  they  may 
not;  there  is  no  question  of  the  popu 
larity. 

But  I  do  not  mean  to  imply  that  their 
case  covers  the  whole  ground.     So  far 


'53 


as  it  goes,  though,  it  ought  to  stop  the 
mouths  of  those  who  complain  that  fic 
tion  is  enslaved  to  propriety  among  us. 
It  appears  that  of  a  certain  kind  of  im 
propriety  it  is  free  to  give  us  all  it  will, 
and  more.  But  this  is  not  what  serious 
men  and  women  writing  fiction  mean 
when  they  rebel  against  the  limitations  of 
their  art  in  our  civilization.  They  have 
no  desire  to  deal  with  nakedness,  as 
painters  and  sculptors  freely  do  in  the 
worship  of  beauty ;  or  with  certain  facts 
of  life,  as  the  stage  does,  in  the  service  of 
sensation.  But  they  ask  why,  when  the 
conventions  of  the  plastic  and  histrionic 
arts  liberate  their  followers  to  the  por 
trayal  of  almost  any  phase  of  the  physical 
or  of  the  emotional  nature,  an  American 
novelist  may  not  write  a  story  on  the 
lines  of  Anna  Karenina  or  Madame  Bo- 
vary.  Sappho  they  put  aside,  and  from 
Zola's  work  they  avert  their  eyes.  They 
do  not  condemn  him  or  Daudet,  neces 
sarily,  or  accuse  their  motives  ;  they  leave 
them  out  of  the  question ;  they  do  not 
want  to  do  that  kind  of  thing.  But  they 
do  sometimes  wish  to  do  another  kind,  to 


"54 


touch  one  of  the  most  serious  and  sorrow 
ful  problems  of  life  in  the  spirit  of  Tolstoi 
and  Flaubert,  and  they  ask  why  they  may 
not.  At  one  time,  they  remind  us,  the 
Anglo-Saxon  novelist  did  deal  with  such 
problems — De  Foe  in  his  spirit,  Richard 
son  in  his,  Goldsmith  in  his.  At  what 
moment  did  our  fiction  lose  this  privilege  ? 
In  what  fatal  hour  did  the  Young  Girl 
arise  and  seal  the  lips  of  Fiction,  with  a 
touch  of  her  finger,  to  some  of  the  most 
vital  interests  of  life  ? 

Whether  I  wished  to  oppose  them  in 
their  aspiration  for  greater  freedom,  or 
whether  I  wished  to  encourage  them,  I 
should  begin  to  answer  them  by  say 
ing  that  the  Young  Girl  had  never  done 
anything  of  the  kind.  The  manners  of 
the  novel  have  been  improving  with  those 
of  its  readers ;  that  is  all.  Gentlemen 
no  longer  swear  or  fall  drunk  under  the 
table,  or  abduct  young  ladies  and  shut 
them  up  in  lonely  country-houses,  or  so 
habitually  set  about  the  ruin  of  their 
neighbors'  wives,  as  they  once  did.  Gen 
erally,  people  now  call  a  spade  an  agri 
cultural  implement ;  they  have  not  grown 


'55 


decent  without  having  also  grown  a  little 
squeamish,  but  they  have  grown  compar 
atively  decent;  there  is  no  doubt  about 
that.  They  require  of  a  novelist  whom 
they  respect  unquestionable  proof  of  his 
seriousness,  if  he  proposes  to  deal  with 
certain  phases  of  life ;  they  require  a  sort 
of  scientific  decorum.  He  can  no  longer 
expect  to  be  received  on  the  ground  of 
entertainment  only;  he  assumes  a  higher 
function,  something  like  that  of  a  phy 
sician  or  a  priest,  and  they  expect  him  to 
be  bound  by  laws  as  sacred  as  those  of 
such  professions  ;  they  hold  him  solemnly 
pledged  not  to  betray  them  or  abuse  their 
confidence.  If  he  will  accept  the  condi 
tions,  they  give  him  their  confidence,  and 
he  may  then  treat  to  his  greater  honor, 
and  not  at  all  to  his  disadvantage,  of  such 
experiences,  such  relations  of  men  and 
women  as  George  Eliot  treats  in  Adam 
Bede,  in  Daniel  Deronda,  in  Romola,  in 
almost  all  her  books  ;  such  as  Hawthorne 
treats  in  the  Scarlet  Letter  ;  such  as  Dick 
ens  treats  in  David  Copperfield ;  such 
as  Thackeray  treats  in  Pendennis,  and 
glances  at  in  every  one  of  his  fictions ;  such 


as  most  of  the  masters  of  English  fiction 
have  at  some  time  treated  more  or  less 
openly.  It  is  quite  false  or  quite  mistaken 
to  suppose  that  our  novels  have  left  un 
touched  these  most  important  realities  of 
life.  They  have  only  not  made  them  their 
stock  in  trade  ;  they  have  kept  a  true  per 
spective  in  regard  to  them  ;  they  have 
relegated  them  in  their  pictures  of  life  to 
the  space  and  place  they  occupy  in  life  it 
self,  as  we  know  it  in  England  and  Amer 
ica.  They  have  kept  a  correct  propor 
tion,  knowing  perfectly  well  that  unless 
the  novel  is  to  be  a  map,  with  every 
thing  scrupulously  laid  down  in  it,  a  faith 
ful  record  of  life  in  far  the  greater  extent 
could  be  made  to  the  exclusion  of  guilty 
love  and  all  its  circumstances  and  conse 
quences. 

I  justify  them  in  this  view  not  only  be 
cause  I  hate  what  is  cheap  and  meretri 
cious,  and  hold  in  peculiar  loathing  the 
cant  of  the  critics  who  require  "  passion  " 
as  something  in  itself  admirable  and  de 
sirable  in  a  novel,  but  because  I  prize 
fidelity  in  the  historian  of  feeling  and 
character.  Most  of  these  critics  who  de- 


mand  "  passion  "  would  seem  to  have  no 
conception  of  any  passion  but  one.  Yet 
there  are  several  other  passions  :  the  pas 
sion  of  grief,  the  passion  of  avarice,  the 
passion  of  pity,  the  passion  of  ambition, 
the  passion  of  hate,  the  passion  of  envy, 
the  passion  of  devotion,  the  passion  of 
friendship ;  and  all  these  have  a  greater 
part  in  the  drama  of  life  than  the  passion 
of  love,  and  infinitely  greater  than  the 
passion  of  guilty  love.  Wittingly  or  un 
wittingly,  English  fiction  and  American 
fiction  have  recognized  this  truth,  not 
fully,  not  in  the  measure  it  merits,  but  in 
greater  degree  than  most  other  fiction. 


XXV 

>HO  can  deny  that  fiction 
would  be  incomparably 
stronger,  incomparably 
truer,  if  once  it  could  tear 
off  the  habit  which  enslaves 
it  to  the  celebration  chiefly  of  a  single  pas 
sion,  in  one  phase  or  another,  and  could 
frankly  dedicate  itself  to  the  service  of  all 
the  passions,  all  the  interests,  all  the  facts? 
Every  novelist  who  has  thought  about  his 
art  knows  that  it  would,  and  I  think  that 
upon  reflection  he  must  doubt  whether 
his  sphere  would  be  greatly  enlarged  if 
he  were  allowed  to  treat  freely  the  darker 
aspects  of  the  favorite  passion.  But,  as 
I  have  shown,  the  privilege,  the  right  to 
do  this,  is  already  perfectly  recognized. 
This  is  proved  again  by  the  fact  that  seri 
ous  criticism  recognizes  as  master-works 
(I  will  not  push  the  question  of  suprem 
acy)  the  two  great  novels  which  above 


all  others  have  moved  the  world  by  their 
study  of  guilty  love.  If  by  any  chance, 
if  by  some  prodigious  miracle,  any  Amer 
ican  should  now  arise  to  treat  it  on  the 
level  of  Anna  Karenina  and  Madame 
Bovary,  he  would  be  absolutely  sure  of 
success,  and  of  fame  and  gratitude  as 
great  as  those  books  have  won  for  their 
authors. 

But  what  editor  of  what  American  mag 
azine  would  print  such  a  story  ? 

Certainly  I  do  not  think  any  one  would  ; 
and  here  our  novelist  must  again  submit 
to  conditions.  If  he  wishes  to  publish 
such  a  story  (supposing  him  to  have  once 
written  it),  he  must  publish  it  as  a  book. 
A  book  is  something  by  itself,  responsible 
for  its  character,  which  becomes  quickly 
known,  and  it  does  not  necessarily  pene 
trate  to  every  member  of  the  household. 
The  father  or  the  mother  may  say  to  the 
child,  "  I  would  rather  you  wouldn't  read 
that  book;"  if  the  child  cannot  be  trusted, 
the  book  may  be  locked  up.  But  with 
the  magazine  and  its  serial  the  affair  is 
different.  Between  the  editor  of  a  repu 
table  English  or  American  magazine  and 


the  families  which  receive  it  there  is  a 
tacit  agreement  that  he  will  print  nothing 
which  a  father  may  not  read  to  his  daugh 
ter,  or  safely  leave  her  to  read  herself. 
After  all,  it  is  a  matter  of  business  ;  and 
the  insurgent  novelist  should  consider  the 
situation  with  coolness  and  common- 
sense.  The  editor  did  not  create  the 
situation ;  but  it  exists,  and  he  could  not 
even  attempt  to  change  it  without  many 
sorts  of  disaster.  He  respects  it,  there 
fore,  with  the  good  faith  of  an  honest 
man.  Even  when  he  is  himself  a  novelist, 
with  ardor  for  his  art  and  impatience  of 
the  limitations  put  upon  it,  he  interposes 
his  veto,  as  Thackeray  did  in  the  case  of 
Trollope  when  a  contributor  approaches 
forbidden  ground. 

It  does  not  avail  to  say  that  the  daily 
papers  teem  with  facts  far  fouler  and 
deadlier  than  any  which  fiction  could  im 
agine.  That  is  true,  but  it  is  true  also 
that  the  sex  which  reads  the  most  novels 
reads  the  fewest  newspapers  ;  and,  besides, 
the  reporter  does  not  command  the  novel 
ist's  skill  to  fix  impressions  in  a  young 
girl's  mind  or  to  suggest  conjecture.  The 


magazine  is  a  littte  despotic,  a  little  arbi 
trary  ;  but  unquestionably  its  favor  is  es 
sential  to  success,  and  its  conditions  are 
not  such  narrow  ones.  You  cannot  deal 
with  Tolstoi's  and  Flaubert's  subjects  in 
the  absolute  artistic  freedom  of  Tolstoi 
and  Flaubert ;  since  De  Foe,  that  is  un 
known  among  us ;  but  if  you  deal  with 
them  in  the  manner  of  George  Eliot,  of 
Thackeray,  of  Dickens,  of  society,  you  may 
deal  with  them  even  in  the  magazines. 
There  is  no  other  restriction  upon  you. 
All  the  horrors  and  miseries  and  tortures 
are  open  to  you ;  your  pages  may  drop 
blood  ;  sometimes  it  may  happen  that  the 
editor  will  even  exact  such  strong  mate 
rial  from  you.  But  probably  he  will  re 
quire  nothing  but  the  observance  of  the 
convention  in  question  ;  and  if  you  do  not 
yourself  prefer  bloodshed  he  will  leave 
you  free  to  use  all  sweet  and  peaceable 
means  of  interesting  his  readers. 

Believe  me,  it  is  no  narrow  field  he 
throws  open  to  you,  with  that  little  sign 
to  keep  off  the  grass  up  at  one  point 
only.  Its  vastness  is  still  almost  unex 
plored,  and  whole  regions  in  it  are  un- 


162 


known  to  the  fictionist.  Dig  anywhere, 
and  do  but  dig  deep  enough,  and  you 
strike  riches ;  or,  if  you  are  of  the  mind 
to  range,  the  gentler  climes,  the  softer 
temperatures,  the  serener  skies,  are  all 
free  to  you,  and  are  so  little  visited  that 
the  chance  of  novelty  is  greater  among 
them. 


XXVI 

HILE  the  Americans  have 
greatly  excelled  in  the  short 
story  generally,  they  have 
almost  created  a  species  of 
it  in  the  Thanskgiving  story. 
We  have  transplanted  the  Christmas  sto 
ry  from  England,  while  the  Thanksgiving 
story  is  native  to  our  air ;  but  both  are  of 
Anglo  -  Saxon  growth.  Their  difference 
is  from  a  difference  of  environment;  and 
the  Christmas  story  when  naturalized 
among  us  becomes  almost  identical  in 
motive,  incident,  and  treatment  with  the 
Thanksgiving  story.  If  I  were  to  gener 
alize  a  distinction  between  them,  I  should 
say  that  the  one  dealt  more  with  marvels 
and  the  other  more  with  morals ;  and  yet 
the  critic  should  beware  of  speaking  too 
confidently  on  this  point.  It  is  certain, 
however,  that  the  Christmas  season  is 
meteorologically  more  favorable  to  the 


164 


effective  return  of  persons  long  supposed 
lost  at  sea,  or  from  a  prodigal  life,  or  from 
a  darkened  mind.  The  longer,  denser, 
and  colder  nights  are  better  adapted  to 
the  apparition  of  ghosts,  and  to  all  man 
ner  of  signs  and  portents ;  while  they  seem 
to  present  a  wider  field  for  the  active  in 
tervention  of  angels  in  behalf  of  orphans 
and  outcasts.  The  dreams  of  elderly 
sleepers  at  this  time  are  apt  to  be  such 
as  will  effect  a  lasting  change  in  them 
when  they  awake,  turning  them  from  the 
hard,  cruel,  and  grasping  habits  of  a  life 
time,  and  reconciling  them  to  their  sons, 
daughters,  and  nephews,  who  have  thwart 
ed  them  in  marriage ;  or  softening  them  to 
their  meek,  uncomplaining  wives,  whose 
hearts  they  have  trampled  upon  in  their 
reckless  pursuit  of  wealth  ;  and  generally 
disposing  them  to  a  distribution  of  ham 
pers  among  the  sick  and  poor,  and  to  a 
friendly  reception  of  chubby  gentlemen 
with  charity  subscription  papers.  Ships 
readily  drive  upon  rocks  in  the  early  twi 
light,  and  offer  exciting  difficulties  of  sal 
vage  ;  and  the  heavy  snows  gather  thickly 
round  the  steps  of  wanderers  who  lie 


down  to  die  in  them,  preparatory  to  their 
discovery  and  rescue  by  immediate  rela 
tives.  The  midnight  weather  is  also  very 
suitable  to  encounter  with  murderers  and 
burglars  ;  and  the  contrast  of  its  freezing 
gloom  with  the  light  and  cheer  in-doors 
promotes  the  gayeties  which  merge,  at 
all  well-regulated  country-houses,  in  love 
and  marriage.  In  the  region  of  pure 
character  no  moment  could  be  so  availa 
ble  for  flinging  off  the  mask  of  frivolity, 
or  imbecility,  or  savagery,  which  one  has 
worn  for  ten  or  twenty  long  years,  say, 
for  the  purpose  of  foiling  some  villain, 
and  surprising  the  reader,  and  helping 
the  author  out  with  his  plot.  Persons 
abroad  in  the  Alps,  or  Apennines,  or 
Pyrenees,  or  anywhere  seeking  shelter  in 
the  huts  of  shepherds  or  the  dens  of 
smugglers,  find  no  time  like  it  for  lying 
in  a  feigned  slumber,  and  listening  to  the 
whispered  machinations  of  their  suspi 
cious-looking  entertainers,  and  then  sud 
denly  starting  up  and  fighting  their  way 
out ;  or  else  springing  from  the  real  sleep 
into  which  they  have  sunk  exhausted, 
and  finding  it  broad  day  and  the  good 


i66 


peasants  whom  they  had  so  unjustly 
doubted,  waiting  breakfast  for  them.  We 
need  not  point  out  the  superior  advan 
tages  of  the  Christmas  season  for  anything 
one  has  a  mind  to  do  with  the  French 
Revolution,  or  the  Arctic  explorations,  or 
the  Indian  Mutiny,  or  the  horrors  of  Si 
berian  exile ;  there  is  no  time  so  good 
for  the  use  of  this  material ;  and  ghosts 
on  shipboard  are  notoriously  fond  of 
Christmas  Eve.  In  our  own  logging 
camps  the  man  who  has  gone  into  the 
woods  for  the  winter,  after  quarrelling 
with  his  wife,  then  hears  her  sad  appeal 
ing  voice,  and  is  moved  to  good  resolu 
tions  as  at  no  other  period  of  the  year ; 
and  in  the  mining  regions,  first  in  Cali 
fornia  and  later  in  Colorado,  the  hardened 
reprobate,  dying  in  his  boots,  smells  his 
mother's  dough-nuts,  and  breathes  his 
last  in  a  soliloquized  vision  of  the  old 
home,  and  the  little  brother,  or  sister,  or 
the  old  father  coming  to  meet  him  from 
heaven  ;  while  his  rude  companions  listen 
round  him,  and  dry  their  eyes  on  the  buts 
of  their  revolvers. 

It  has  to  be  very  grim,  all  that,  to  be 


167 


truly  effective  ;  and  here,  already,  we  have 
a  touch  in  the  Americanized  Christmas 
story  of  the  moralistic  quality  of  the 
American  Thanksgiving  story.  This  was 
seldom  written,  at  first,  for  the  mere  en 
tertainment  of  the  reader ;  it  was  meant 
to  entertain  him,  of  course ;  but  it  was 
meant  to  edify  him,  too,  and  to  improve 
him ;  and  some  such  intention  is  still 
present  in  it.  I  rather  think  that  it  deals 
more  probably  with  character  to  this  end 
than  its  English  cousin,  the  Christmas 
story,  does.  It  is  not  so  improbable  that 
a  man  should  leave  off  being  a  drunkard 
on  Thanksgiving,  as  that  he  should  leave 
off  being  a  curmudgeon  on  Christmas ; 
that  he  should  conquer  his  appetite  as 
that  he  should  instantly  change  his  nat 
ure,  by  good  resolutions.  He  would  be 
very  likely,  indeed,  to  break  his  resolu 
tions  in  either  case,  but  not  so  likely  in 
the  one  as  in  the  other. 

Generically,  the  Thanksgiving  story  is 
cheerfuler  in  its  drama  and  simpler  in  its 
persons  than  the  Christmas  story.  Rare 
ly  has  it  dealt  with  the  supernatural, 
either  the  apparition  of  ghosts  or  the  in- 


1 68 


tervention  of  angels.  The  weather  being 
so  much  milder  at  the  close  of  November 
than  it  is  a  month  later,  very  little  can  be 
done  with  the  elements ;  though  on  the 
coast  a  north-easterly  storm  has  been, 
and  can  be,  very  usefully  employed.  The 
Thanksgiving  story  is  more  restricted  in 
its  range  ;  the  scene  is  still  mostly  in  New 
England,  and  the  characters  are  of  New 
England  extraction,  who  come  home  from 
the  West  usually,  or  New  York,  for  the 
event  of  the  little  drama,  whatever  i± 
may  be.  It  may  be  the  reconciliation 
of  kinsfolk  who  have  quarrelled ;  or  the 
union  of  lovers  long  estranged ;  or  hus 
bands  and  wives  who  have  had  hard 
words  and  parted ;  or  mothers  who  had 
thought  their  sons  dead  in  California  and 
find  themselves  agreeably  disappointed 
in  their  return ;  or  fathers  who  for  old 
time's  sake  receive  back  their  erring 
and  conveniently  dying  daughters.  The 
notes  are  not  many  which  this  simple 
music  sounds,  but  they  have  a  Sabbath 
tone,  mostly,  and  win  the  listener  to  kind 
lier  thoughts  and  better  moods.  The  art 
is  at  its  highest  in  some  strong  sketch  of 


i69 


Mrs.  Rose  Terry  Cooke's,  or  some  per 
fectly  satisfying  study  of  Miss  Jewett's, 
or  some  graphic  situation  of  Miss  Wil- 
kins's  ;  and  then  it  is  a  very  fine  art.  But 
mostly  it  is  poor  and  rude  enough,  and 
makes  openly,  shamelessly,  sickeningly, 
for  the  reader's  emotions,  as  well  as  his 
morals.  It  is  inclined  to  be  rather  de 
scriptive.  The  turkey,  the  pumpkin,  the 
cornfield,  figure  throughout;  and  the  leaf 
less  woods  are  blue  and  cold  against  the 
evening  sky  behind  the  low  hip- roofed, 
old-fashioned  homestead.  The  parlance 
is  usually  the  Yankee  dialect  and  its  west 
ern  modifications. 

The  Thanksgiving  story  is  mostly  con 
fined  in  scene  to  the  country  ;  it  does  not 
seem  possible  to  do  much  with  it  in  town  ; 
and  it  is  a  serious  question  whether  with 
its  geographical  and  topical  limitations  it 
can  hold  its  own  against  the  Christmas 
story ;  and  whether  it  would  not  be  well 
for  authors  to  consider  a  combination 
with  its  elder  rival. 

The  two  feasts  are  so  near  together  in 
point  of  time  that  they  could  be  easily 
covered  by  the  sentiment  of  even  a  brief 


1 7o 


narrative.  Under  the  agglutinated  style 
of  A  Thanksgiving-Christmas  Story,  fic 
tion  appropriate  to  both  could  be  pro 
duced,  and  both  could  be  employed  natu 
rally  and  probably  in  the  transaction  of 
its  affairs  and  the  development  of  its 
characters.  The  plot  for  such  a  story 
could  easily  be  made  to  include  a  total- 
abstinence  pledge  and  family  reunion  at 
Thanksgiving,  and  an  apparition  and  spir 
itual  regeneration  over  a  bowl  of  punch 
at  Christmas. 

Not  all  Thanksgiving-Christmas  stories 
need  be  of  this  pattern  precisely  ;  I  wish 
to  suggest  merely  one  way  of  doing  them. 
Perhaps  when  our  writers  really  come  to 
the  work  they  will  find  sufficient  inspira 
tion  in  its  novelty  to  turn  to  human  life 
and  observe  how  it  is  really  affected  on 
these  holidays,  and  be  tempted  to  present 
some  of  its  actualities.  This  would  be  a 
great  thing  to  do,  and  would  come  home 
to  readers  with  surprise. 


XXVII 

would  be  interesting  to 
know  the  far  beginnings 
°^  holiday  literature,  and  I 
commend  the  quest  to  the 
scientific  spirit  which  now 
specializes  research  in  every  branch  of 
history.  In  the  mean  time,  without  be 
ing  too  confident  of  the  facts,  I  venture 
to  suggest  that  it  came  in  with  the  ro 
mantic  movement  about  the  beginning  of 
this  century,  when  mountains  ceased  to 
be  horrid  and  became  picturesque  ;  when 
ruins  of  all  sorts,  but  particularly  abbeys 
and  castles,  became  habitable  to  the  most 
delicate  constitutions ;  when  the  despised 
Gothick  of  Addison  dropped  its  "  k,"  and 
arose  the  chivalrous  and  religious  Gothic 
of  Scott ;  when  ghosts  were  redeemed 
from  the  contempt  into  which  they  had 
fallen,  and  resumed  their  place  in  polite 
society ;  in  fact,  the  politer  the  society, 


I72 


the  welcomer  the  ghosts,  and  whatever 
else  was  out  of  the  common.  In  that  day 
the  Annual  flourished,  and  this  artificial 
flower  was  probably  the  first  literary  blos 
som  on  the  Christmas  Tree  which  has 
since  borne  so  much  tinsel  foliage  and 
painted  fruit.  But  the  Annual  was  ex 
tremely  Oriental ;  it  was  much  preoccu 
pied  with  Haidees  and  Gulnares  and 
Zuleikas,  with  Hindas  and  Nourmahals, 
owing  to  the  distinction  which  Byron 
and  Moore  had  given  such  ladies ;  and 
when  it  began  to  concern  itself  with  the 
actualities  of  British  beauty,  the  daugh 
ters  of  Albion,  though  inscribed  with  the 
names  of  real  countesses  and  duchesses, 
betrayed  their  descent  from  the  well- 
known  Eastern  odalisques.  It  was  pos 
sibly  through  an  American  that  holiday 
literature  became  distinctively  English  in 
material,  and  Washington  Irving,  with  his 
New  World  love  of  the  past,  may  have 
given  the  impulse  to  the  literary  worship 
of  Christmas  which  has  since  so  widely 
established  itself.  A  festival  revived  in 
popular  interest  by  a  New-Yorker  to 
whom  Dutch  associations  with  New- 


year's  had  endeared  the  German  ideal  of 
Christmas,  and  whom  the  robust  gayeties 
of  the  season  in  old  -  fashioned  country- 
houses  had  charmed,  would  be  one  of 
those  roundabout  results  which  destiny 
likes,  and  "  would  at  least  be  Early  Eng 
lish."  If  we  cannot  claim  with  all  the 
patriotic  confidence  we  should  like  to  feel 
that  it  was  Irving  who  set  Christmas  in 
that  light  in  which  Dickens  saw  its  aes 
thetic  capabilities,  it  is  perhaps  because 
all  origins  are  obscure.  For  anything 
that  we  positively  know  to  the  contrary, 
the  Druidic  rites  from  which  English 
Christmas  borrowed  the  inviting  mistle 
toe,  if  not  the  decorative  holly,  may  have 
been  accompanied  by  the  recitations  of 
holiday  triads.  But  it  is  certain  that  sev 
eral  plays  of  Shakespeare  were  produced, 
if  not  written,  for  the  celebration  of  the 
holidays,  and  that  then  the  black  tide  of 
Puritanism  which  swept  over  men's  souls 
blotted  out  all  such  observance  of  Christ 
mas  with  the  festival  itself.  It  came  in 
again,  by  a  natural  reaction,  with  the  re 
turning  Stuarts,  and  throughout  the  pe» 
riod  of  the  Restoration  it  enjoyed  a  per- 


functory  favor.  There  is  mention  of  it 
often  enough  in  the  eighteenth  century 
essayists,  in  the  Spectators  and  Idlers  and 
Tatlers ;  but  the  World  about  the  mid 
dle  of  the  last  century  laments  the  neglect 
into  which  it  had  fallen.  Irving  seems 
to  have  been  the  first  to  observe  its  sur 
viving  rites  lovingly,  and  Dickens  divined 
its  immense  advantage  as  a  literary  oc 
casion.  He  made  it  in  some  sort  entire 
ly  his  for  a  time,  and  there  can  be  no 
question  but  it  was  he  who  again  en 
deared  it  to  the  whole  English-speaking 
world,  and  gave  it  a  wider  and  deeper 
hold  than  it  had  ever  had  before  upon  the 
fancies  and  affections  of  our  race. 

The  might  of  that  great  talent  no  one 
can  gainsay,  though  in  the  light  of  the 
truer  work  which  has  since  been  done  his 
literary  principles  seem  almost  as  gro 
tesque  as  his  theories  of  political  econ 
omy.  In  no  one  direction  was  his  erring 
force  more  felt  than  in  the  creation  of 
holiday  literature  as  we  have  known  it  for 
the  last  half-century.  Creation,  of  course, 
is  the  wrong  word  ;  it  says  too  much  ;  but 
in  default  of  a  better  word,  it  may  stand. 


He  did  not  make  something  out  of  noth 
ing  ;  the  material  was  there  before  him ; 
the  mood  and  even  the  need  of  his  time 
contributed  immensely  to  his  success,  as 
the  volition  of  the  subject  helps  on  the 
mesmerist ;  but  it  is  within  bounds  to  say 
that  he  was  the  chief  agency  in  the  de 
velopment  of  holiday  literature  as  we  have 
known  it,  as  he  was  the  chief  agency  in 
universalizing  the  great  Christian  holi 
day  as  we  now  have  it.  Other  agencies 
wrought  with  him  and  after  him;  but  it 
was  he  who  rescued  Christmas  from  Puri 
tan  distrust,  and  humanized  it  and  con 
secrated  it  to  the  hearts  and  homes  of  all. 
Very  rough  magic,  as  it  now  seems,  he 
used  in  working  his  miracle,  but  there  is 
no  doubt  about  his  working  it.  One 
opens  his  Christmas  stories  in  this  later 
day — The  Carol,  The  Chimes,  The  Haunt 
ed  Man,  The  Cricket  on  the  Hearth,  and 
all  the  rest — and  with  "  a  heart  high-sor 
rowful  and  cloyed,"  asks  himself  for  the 
preternatural  virtue  that  they  once  had. 
The  pathos  appears  false  and  strained ; 
the  humor  largely  horse -play;  the  char 
acter  theatrical ;  the  joviality  pumped ; 


«76 


the  psychology  commonplace ;  the  soci 
ology  alone  funny.  It  is  a  world  of  real 
clothes,  earth,  air,  water,  and  the  rest  ; 
the  people  often  speak  the  language  of 
life,  but  their  motives  are  as  dispro por 
tioned  and  improbable,  and  their  passions 
and  purposes  as  overcharged,  as  those  of 
the  worst  of  Balzac's  people.  Yet  all 
these  monstrosities,  as  they  now  appear, 
seem  to  have  once  had  symmetry  and 
verity ;  they  moved  the  most  cultivated 
intelligences  of  the  time  ;  they  touched 
true  hearts ;  they  made  everybody  laugh 
and  cry. 

This  was  perhaps  because  the  imagina 
tion,  from  having  been  fed  mostly  upon 
gross  unrealities,  always  responds  readily 
to  fantastic  appeals.  There  has  been  an 
amusing  sort  of  awe  of  it,  as  if  it  were  the 
channel  of  inspired  thought,  and  were 
somehow  sacred.  The  most  preposter 
ous  inventions  of  its  activity  have  been 
regarded  in  their  time  as  the  greatest  feats 
of  the  human  mind,  and  in  its  receptive 
form  it  has  been  nursed  into  an  imbecility 
to  which  the  truth  is  repugnant,  and  the 
fact  that  the  beautiful  resides  nowhere 


>77 


else  is  inconceivable.  It  has  been  flat 
tered  out  of  all  sufferance  in  its  toyings 
with  the  mere  elements  of  character,  and 
its  attempts  to  present  these  in  combina 
tions  foreign  to  experience  are  still  praised 
by  the  poorer  sort  of  critics  as  master 
pieces  of  creative  work. 

In  the  day  of  Dickens's  early  Christmas 
stories  it  was  thought  admirable  for  the 
author  to  take  types  of  humanity  which 
everybody  knew,  and  to  add  to  them  from 
his  imagination  till  they  were  as  strange 
as  beasts  and  birds  talking.  Now  we  be 
gin  to  feel  that  human  nature  is  quite 
enough,  and  that  the  best  an  author  can 
do  is  to  show  it  as  it  is.  But  in  those 
stories  of  his  Dickens  said  to  his  readers, 
Let  us  make  believe  so-and-so;  and  the 
result  was  a  joint  juggle,  a  child's-play, 
in  which  the  wholesome  allegiance  to 
life  was  lost.  Artistically,  therefore,  the 
scheme  was  false,  and  artistically,  there 
fore,  it  must  perish.  It  did  not  perish, 
however,  before  it  had  propagated  itself 
in  a  whole  school  of  unrealities  so  ghast 
ly  that  one  can  hardly  recall  without  a 
shudder  those  sentimentalities  at  second- 


i78 


hand  to  which  holiday  literature  was 
abandoned  long  after  the  original  con 
jurer  had  wearied  of  his  performance. 

Under  his  own  eye  and  of  conscious 
purpose  a  circle  of  imitators  grew  up 
in  the  fabrication  of  Christmas  stories. 
They  obviously  formed  themselves  upon 
his  sobered  ideals ;  they  collaborated  with 
him,  and  it  was  often  hard  to  know  wheth 
er  it  was  Dickens  or  Mr.  Sala  or  Mr.  Col 
lins  who  was  writing.  The  Christmas 
book  had  by  that  time  lost  its  direct  ap 
plication  to  Christmas.  It  dealt  with 
shipwrecks  a  good  deal,  and  with  peril 
ous  adventures  of  all  kinds,  and  with  un 
merited  suffering,  and  with  ghosts  and 
mysteries,  because  human  nature,  secure 
from  storm  and  danger  in  a  well-lighted 
room  before  a  cheerful  fire,  likes  to  have 
these  things  imaged  for  it,  and  its  long- 
puerilized  fancy  will  bear  an  endless  repe 
tition  of  them.  The  wizards  who  wrought 
their  spells  with  them  contented  them 
selves  with  the  lasting  efficacy  of  these 
simple  means  ;  and  the  apprentice  -  wiz 
ards  and  journeyman-wizards  who  have 
succeeded  them  practise  the  same  arts  at 


the  old  stand  ;  but  the  ethical  intention 
which  gave  dignity  to  Dickens's  Christ 
mas  stories  of  still  earlier  date  has  almost 
wholly  disappeared.  It  was  a  quality 
which  could  not  be  worked  so  long  as 
the  phantoms  and  hair-breadth  escapes. 
People  always  knew  that  character  is  not 
changed  by  a  dream  in  a  series  of  tableaux ; 
that  a  ghost  cannot  do  much  towards  re 
forming  an  inordinately  selfish  person; 
that  a  life  cannot  be  turned  white,  like  a 
head  of  hair,  in  a  single  night,  by  the  most 
allegorical  apparition ;  that  want  and  sin 
and  shame  cannot  be  cured  by  kettles 
singing  on  the  hob ;  and  gradually  they 
ceased  to  make  believe  that  there  was 
virtue  in  these  devices  and  appliances. 
Yet  the  ethical  intention  was  not  fruit 
less,  crude  as  it  now  appears.  It  was  well 
once  a  year,  if  not  oftener,  to  remind  men 
by  parable  of  the  old,  simple  truths;  to 
teach  them  that  forgiveness,  and  charity, 
and  the  endeavor  for  life  better  and  purer 
than  each  has  lived,  are  the  principles 
upon  which  alone  the  world  holds  togeth 
er  and  gets  forward.  It  was  well  for  the 
comfortable  and  the  refined  to  be  put  in 


mind  of  the  savagery  and  suffering  all 
round  them,  and  to  be  taught,  as  Dickens 
was  always  teaching,  that  certain  feelings 
which  grace  human  nature,  as  tenderness 
for  the  sick  and  helpless,  self-sacrifice  and 
generosity,  self-respect  and  manliness  and 
womanliness,  are  the  common  heritage  of 
the  race,  the  direct  gift  of  Heaven,  shared 
equally  by  the  rich  and  poor.  It  did  not 
necessarily  detract  from  the  value  of  the 
lesson  that,  with  the  imperfect  art  of  the 
time,  he  made  his  paupers  and  porters  not 
only  human,  but  superhuman,  and  too  al 
together  virtuous ;  and  it  remained  true 
that  home  life  may  be  lovely  under  the 
lowliest  roof,  although  he  liked  to  paint 
it  without  a  shadow  on  its  beauty  there. 
It  is  still  a  fact  that  the  sick  are  very  of 
ten  saintly,  although  he  put  no  peevish 
ness  into  their  patience  with  their  ills. 
His  ethical  intention  told  for  manhood 
and  fraternity  and  tolerance,  and  when 
this  intention  disappeared  from  the  bet 
ter  holiday  literature,  that  literature  was 
sensibly  the  poorer  for  the  loss. 

It  never  did  disappear  wholly  from  the 
writings  of  Dickens,  whom  it  once  vitally 


possessed,  and  if  its  action  became  more 
and  more  mechanical,  still  it  always  had 
its  effect  with  the  generation  which  hung 
charmed  upon  his  lips,  till  the  lips  fell 
dumb  and  still  forever.  It  imbued  sub 
ordinate  effort,  and  inspired  his  myriad 
imitators  throughout  the  English  -  scrib 
bling  world,  especially  upon  its  remot 
er  borders,  so  that  all  holiday  fiction, 
which  was  once  set  to  the  tunes  of  The 
Carol  and  The  Chimes,  still  grinds  no 
other  through  the  innumerable  pipes  of 
the  humbler  newspapers  and  magazines, 
though  these  airs  are  no  longer  heard  in 
the  politer  literary  centres. 

This  cannot  go  on  forever,  of  course, 
but  the  Christmas  whose  use  and  beauty 
Dickens  divined  will  remain,  though 
Christmas  literature  is  going  the  way  of 
so  much  that  was  once  admired,  like  the 
fine  language,  the  beauties  of  style,  and 
the  ornate  manners  of  the  past,  down 
through  the  ranks  of  the  sesthetical  poor, 
whom  we  have  always  with  us,  to  the  final 
rag-bag  of  oblivion. 

It  is  still  manufactured  among  us  in 
the  form  of  short  stories  ;  but  the  Christ- 


mas  book,  which  now  seems  to  be  always 
a  number  of  paste  gems  threaded  upon  a 
strand  of  tinsel,  must  be  imported  from 
England  if  we  want  it.  With  the  con 
stant  and  romantic  public  of  the  British 
islands  it  appears  that  spectres  and  im 
minent  dangers  still  have  favor  enough 
to  inspire  their  fabrication,  while  if  I 
may  judge  from  an  absence  of  native 
phantasms  and  perils,  the  industry  has 
no  more  encouragement  among  us  than 
ship-building,  though  no  prohibitive  tar 
iff  has  enhanced  the  cost  of  the  raw  ma 
terials,  or  interfered  to  paralyze  the  ef 
forts  of  the  American  imagination. 


XXVIII 

iUT  if  the  humanitarian  im 
pulse  has  mostly  disappear 
ed  from  Christmas  fiction,  I 
think  it  has  neverso  general 
ly  characterized  all  fiction. 
One  may  refuse  to  recognize  this  im 
pulse  ;  one  may  deny  that  it  is  in  any 
greater  degree  shaping  life  than  ever  be 
fore,  but  no  one  who  has  the  current  of 
literature  under  his  eye  can  fail  to  note 
it  there.  People  are  thinking  and  feel 
ing  generously,  if  not  living  justly,  in  our 
time ;  it  is  a  day  of  anxiety  to  be  saved 
from  the  curse  that  is  on  selfishness,  of 
eager  question  how  others  shall  be  helped, 
of  bold  denial  that  the  conditions  in  which 
we  would  fain  have  rested  are  sacred  or 
immutable.  Especially  in  America,  where 
the  race  has  gained  a  height  never  reach 
ed  before,  the  eminence  enables  more  men 
than  ever  before  to  see  how  even  here 


1 84 


vast  masses  of  men  are  sunk  in  misery 
that  must  grow  every  day  more  hopeless, 
or  embroiled  in  a  struggle  for  mere  life 
that  must  end  in  enslaving  and  imbruting 
them. 

Art,  indeed,  is  beginning  to  find  out 
that  if  it  does  not  make  friends  with 
Need  it  must  perish.  It  perceives  that 
to  take  itself  from  the  many  and  leave 
them  no  joy  in  their  work,  and  to  give 
itself  to  the  few  whom  it  can  bring  no 
joy  in  their  idleness,  is  an  error  that  kills. 
This  has  long  been  the  burden  of  Rus- 
kin's  message :  and  if  we  can  believe 
William  Morris,  the  common  people  have 
heard  him  gladly,  and  have  felt  the  truth 
of  what  he  says.  "  They  see  the  prophet 
in  him  rather  than  the  fantastic  rhetori 
cian,  as  more  superfine  audiences  do ;"  and 
the  men  and  women  who  do  the  hard  work 
of  the  world  have  learned  from  him  and 
from  Morris  that  they  have  a  right  to 
pleasure  in  their  toil,  and  that  when  jus 
tice  is  done  them  they  will  have  it.  In 
all  ages  poetry  has  affirmed  something  of 
this  sort,  but  it  remained  for  ours  to  per 
ceive  it  and  express  it  somehow  in  every 


form  of  literature.  But  this  is  only  one 
phase  of  the  devotion  of  the  best  literature 
of  our  time  to  the  service  of  humanity. 
No  book  written  with  a  low  or  cynical 
motive  could  succeed  now,  no  matter  how 
brilliantly  written  ;  and  the  work  done  in 
the  past  to  the  glorification  of  mere  pas 
sion  and  power,  to  the  deification  of  self, 
appears  monstrous  and  hideous.  The 
romantic  spirit  worshipped  genius,  wor 
shipped  heroism,  but  at  its  best,  in  such 
a  man  as  Victor  Hugo,  this  spirit  recog 
nized  the  supreme  claim  of  the  lowest 
humanity.  Its  error  was  to  idealize  the 
victims  of  society,  to  paint  them  impos 
sibly  virtuous  and  beautiful ;  but  truth, 
which  has  succeeded  to  the  highest  mis 
sion  of  romance,  paints  these  victims  as 
they  are,  and  bids  the  world  consider 
them  not  because  they  are  beautiful  and 
virtuous,  but  because  they  are  ugly  and 
vicious,  cruel,  filthy,  and  only  not  alto 
gether  loathsome  because  the  divine  can 
never  wholly  die  out  of  the  human.  The 
truth  does  not  find  these  victims  among 
the  poor  alone,  among  the  hungry,  the 
houseless,  the  ragged ;  but  it  also  finds 


i86 


them  among  the  rich,  cursed  with  the  aim- 
lessness,  the  satiety,  the  despair  of  wealth, 
wasting  their  lives  in  a  fool's  paradise  of 
shows  and  semblances,  with  nothing  real 
but  the  misery  that  comes  of  insincerity 
and  selfishness. 

It  is  needless  for  me  to  say,  either  to  the 
many  whom  my  opinions  on  this  point  in 
cense  or  to  the  few  who  accept  them,  that 
I  do  not  think  the  fiction  of  our  own  time 
even  always  equal  to  this  work,  or  per 
haps  more  than  seldom  so.  But  as  I  have 
before  expressed,  to  the  still-reverberating 
discontent  of  two  continents, fiction  is  now 
a  finer  art  than  it  has  ever  been  hitherto, 
and  more  nearly  meets  the  requirements 
of  the  infallible  standard.  I  have  hopes 
of  real  usefulness  in  it,  because  it  is  at 
last  building  on  the  only  sure  founda 
tion  ;  but  I  am  by  no  means  certain  that 
it  will  be  the  ultimate  literary  form,  or 
will  remain  as  important  as  we  believe  it 
is  destined  to  become.  On  the  contrary, 
it  is  quite  imaginable  that  when  the  great 
mass  of  readers,  now  sunk  in  the  foolish 
joys  of  mere  fable,  shall  be  lifted  to  an  in 
terest  in  the  meaning  of  things  through 


the  faithful  portrayal  of  life  in  fiction, 
then  fiction  the  most  faithful  may  be 
superseded  by  a  still  more  faithful  form 
of  contemporaneous  history.  I  willingly 
leave  the  precise  character  of  this  form  to 
the  more  robust  imagination  of  readers 
whose  minds  have  been  nurtured  upon 
romantic  novels,  and  who  really  have  an 
imagination  worth  speaking  of,  and  con 
fine  myself,  as  usual,  to  the  hither  side  of 
the  regions  of  conjecture. 

The  art  which  in  the  mean  time  dis 
dains  the  office  of  teacher  is  one  of 
the  last  refuges  of  the  aristocratic  spirit 
which  is  disappearing  from  politics  and 
society,  and  is  now  seeking  to  shelter 
itself  in  aesthetics.  The  pride  of  caste 
is  becoming  the  pride  of  taste ;  but  as 
before,  it  is  averse  to  the  mass  of  men ; 
it  consents  to  know  them  only  in  some 
conventionalized  and  artificial  guise.  It 
seeks  to  withdraw  itself,  to  stand  aloof; 
to  be  distinguished,  and  not  to  be  identi 
fied.  Democracy  in  literature  is  the  re 
verse  of  all  this.  It  wishes  to  know  and 
to  tell  the  truth,  confident  that  consola 
tion  and  delight  are  there ;  it  does  not 


care  to  paint  the  marvellous  and  impos 
sible  for  the  vulgar  many,  or  to  senti 
mentalize  and  falsify  the  actual  for  the 
vulgar  few.  Men  are  more  like  than  un 
like  one  another  :  let  us  make  them  know 
one  another  better,  that  they  may  be  all 
humbled  and  strengthened  with  a  sense 
of  their  fraternity.  Neither  arts,  nor  let 
ters,  nor  sciences,  except  as  they  some 
how,  clearly  or  obscurely,  tend  to  make 
the  race  better  and  kinder,  are  to  be  re 
garded  as  serious  interests ;  they  are  all 
lower  than  the  rudest  crafts  that  feed  and 
house  and  clothe,  for  except  they  do  this 
office  they  are  idle ;  and  they  cannot  do 
this  except  from  and  through  the  truth. 


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